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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FORMAT | MEDIA TYPE | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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deb(5) dpkg suite deb(5)
deb - Debian binary package format
filename.deb
The .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. It is
understood 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).
The file is an ar archive with a magic value of !<arch>. Only the
common 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 (new style
long pathnames and long linknames, supported since dpkg 1.4.1.17;
large file metadata since dpkg 1.18.24), and the POSIX ustar
format (long names supported since dpkg 1.15.0). Unrecognized tar
typeflags are considered an error. Each tar entry size inside a
tar archive is limited to 11 ASCII octal digits, allowing for up
to 8 GiB tar entries. The GNU large file metadata support permits
95-bit tar entry sizes and negative timestamps, and 63-bit UID,
GID and device numbers.
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 (supported since dpkg 1.17.6), or compressed with gzip
(with .gz extension) or xz (with .xz extension, supported since
1.17.6), zstd (with .zst extension, supported since dpkg 1.21.18),
as a series of plain files, of which the file control is mandatory
and contains the core control information, the md5sums, conffiles,
triggers, shlibs and symbols files contain optional control
information, and the preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm files are
optional maintainer scripts. 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), zstd (with
.zst extension, supported since dpkg 1.21.18), bzip2 (with .bz2
extension, supported since dpkg 1.10.24) or lzma (with .lzma
extension, supported 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 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.
Current
application/vnd.debian.binary-package
Deprecated
application/x-debian-package
application/x-deb
deb-old(5), dpkg-deb(1), deb-control(5), deb-conffiles(5),
deb-md5sums(5), deb-triggers(5), deb-shlibs(5), deb-symbols(5),
deb-preinst(5), deb-postinst(5), deb-prerm(5), deb-postrm(5).
This page is part of the dpkg (Debian Package Manager) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=dpkg⟩. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨git
clone https://git.dpkg.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-06.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
1.22.6-77-g86fe7 2024-03-10 deb(5)
Pages that refer to this page: dpkg(1), dpkg-deb(1), dpkg-name(1), dpkg-split(1), dselect(1), deb-control(5), deb-old(5), deb-split(5), deb-version(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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