SYNOPSIS
       filename.deb

DESCRIPTION
       The  .deb format is the Debian binary package file format. It is under-
       stood by dpkg 0.93.76 and later, and is generated  by  default  by  all
       versions of dpkg since 1.2.0 and all i386/ELF versions since 1.1.1elf.

       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>.   The  file
       names might contain a trailing slash.

       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.gz.  It is a gzipped
       tar archive containing the package control information, 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), 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 before
       data.tar  and  which  should  be safely ignored by older programs, will
       have names starting with an underscore, `_'.