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), xz (with .xz extension, supported since 1.17.6) or zstd (with .zst extension, supported since
       1.18.4ubuntu1.7), 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), zstd (with .zst extension, supported since 1.18.4ubuntu1.7),
       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)