Hello o/

I have been trying to understand the .deb package format and here is what I have learned about it so far.

first layer is the most simple it’s just a basic ar archive and we can extract is using ar x filename.deb command. you will see the following files:

control.tar.xz
data.tar.xz
debian-binary
  • debian-binary file specifies the .deb file version which will be 2.0 in most cases.
  • control.tar.xz file contains all the the metadata about the package like the dependencies etc.
  • data.tar.xz file is the file that actually contains all the provided files by the packages.

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