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deb(5)				    Debian				deb(5)

NAME
       deb - Debian binary package format

SYNOPSIS
       filename.deb

DESCRIPTION
       The  .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. It is under‐
       stood since dpkg 0.93.76, and is generated by default since dpkg	 1.2.0
       and 1.1.1elf (i386/ELF builds).

       The format described here is used since Debian 0.93; details of the old
       format are described in deb-old(5).

FORMAT
       The file is an ar archive with a magic value of !<arch>.	 Only the com‐
       mon  ar archive format is supported, with no long file name extensions,
       but with file names containing an optional trailing slash, which limits
       their  length  to  15 characters (from the 16 allowed).	File sizes are
       limited to 10 ASCII decimal digits, allowing for	 up  to	 approximately
       9536.74 MiB member files.

       The  tar archives currently allowed are, the old-style (v7) format, the
       pre-POSIX ustar format, a subset of the GNU format (only the new	 style
       long  pathnames and long linknames, supported since dpkg 1.4.1.17), and
       the POSIX ustar	format	(long  names  supported	 since	dpkg  1.15.0).
       Unrecognized tar typeflags are considered an error.

       The first member is named debian-binary and contains a series of lines,
       separated by newlines. Currently only one line is present,  the	format
       version number, 2.0 at the time this manual page was written.  Programs
       which read new-format archives should be prepared for the minor	number
       to be increased and new lines to be present, and should ignore these if
       this is the case.

       If the major number has changed, an incompatible change has  been  made
       and  the program should stop. If it has not, then the program should be
       able to safely continue, unless it encounters an unexpected  member  in
       the archive (except at the end), as described below.

       The  second  required member is named control.tar.  It is a tar archive
       containing the package control information, either not compressed (sup‐
       ported since dpkg 1.17.6), or compressed with gzip (with .gz extension)
       or xz (with .xz extension, supported since  1.17.6),  as	 a  series  of
       plain  files,  of  which the file control is mandatory and contains the
       core control information. The control tarball may optionally contain an
       entry for `.', the current directory.

       The  third,  last  required  member is named data.tar.  It contains the
       filesystem as a tar archive, either  not	 compressed  (supported	 since
       dpkg  1.10.24),	or compressed with gzip (with .gz extension), xz (with
       .xz extension, supported since dpkg 1.15.6), bzip2  (with  .bz2	exten‐
       sion, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or lzma (with .lzma extension, sup‐
       ported since dpkg 1.13.25).

       These members must occur in this exact order.  Current  implementations
       should  ignore  any additional members after data.tar.  Further members
       may be defined in the future, and (if possible) will  be	 placed	 after
       these  three. Any additional members that may need to be inserted after
       debian-binary and before control.tar.gz or data.tar and which should be
       safely  ignored	by  older  programs,  will have names starting with an
       underscore, `_'.

       Those new members which won't be able to	 be  safely  ignored  will  be
       inserted	 before data.tar with names starting with something other than
       underscores, or will (more likely) cause the major version number to be
       increased.

SEE ALSO
       deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5).

Debian Project			  2013-08-08				deb(5)
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