deb-old(5) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FORMAT | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

deb-old(5)                     dpkg suite                     deb-old(5)

NAME         top

       deb-old - old style Debian binary package format

SYNOPSIS         top

       filename.deb

DESCRIPTION         top

       The .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. This
       manual page describes the old format, used before Debian 0.93.
       Please see deb(5) for details of the new format.

FORMAT         top

       The file is two lines of format information as ASCII text,
       followed by two concatenated gzipped ustar files.

       The first line is the format version number padded to 8 digits,
       and is 0.939000 for all old-format archives.

       The second line is a decimal string (without leading zeroes)
       giving the length of the first gzipped tarfile.

       Each of these lines is terminated with a single newline
       character.

       The first tarfile contains the control information, as a series
       of ordinary files. The file control must be present, as it
       contains the core control information.

       In some very old archives, the files in the control tarfile may
       optionally be in a DEBIAN subdirectory. In that case, the DEBIAN
       subdirectory will be in the control tarfile too, and the control
       tarfile will have only files in that directory. Optionally the
       control tarfile may contain an entry for ‘.’, that is, the
       current directory.

       The second gzipped tarfile is the filesystem archive, containing
       pathnames relative to the root directory of the system to be
       installed on. The pathnames do not have leading slashes.

SEE ALSO         top

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

COLOPHON         top

       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:https://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 2023-12-22.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-12-18.)  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
       [email protected]

1.22.0-52-g1af0                2023-08-30                     deb-old(5)

Pages that refer to this page: deb(5)