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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
       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).


FORMAT

       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 (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
       (supported 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
       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.


MEDIA TYPE

   Current
       application/vnd.debian.binary-package

   Deprecated
       application/x-debian-package
       application/x-deb


SEE ALSO

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

Debian Project                    2014-05-24                            deb(5)

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