Chapter 7. The Debian package management tools

41

7.1.5 Other package management tools

dpkg deb

This program manipulates Debian archive(

.deb

) files. Some common uses are:

  Find out all the options:

dpkg deb   help

.

  Determine what files are contained in a Debian archive file:

dpkg deb   contents

foo_VVV RRR.deb

)

  Extract the files contained in a named Debian archive into a user specified direc 

tory:

dpkg deb   extract foo_VVV RRR.deb tmp

extracts each of the files in

foo_VVV RRR.deb

into the directory

tmp/

. This is convenient for examining the con 

tents of a package in a localized directory, without installing the package into the root file

system.

Note that any packages that were merely unpacked using

dpkg deb   extract

will be in 

correctly installed, you should use

dpkg   install

instead.

More information is given in the manual page

dpkg deb(1)

.

dpkg split

This program splits large package into smaller files (e.g., for writing onto a set of floppy disks),

and can also be used to merge a set of split files back into a single file. It can only be used

on a Debian system (i.e. a system containing the

dpkg

package), since it calls the program

dpkg deb

to parse the debian package file into its component records.

For example, to split a big .deb file into N parts,

  Execute the command

dpkg split   split foo.deb

. This will produce N files each

of approximately 460 KBytes long in the current directory.

  Copy those N files to floppy disks.

  Copy the contents of the floppy disks onto the hard disk of your choice on the other

machine.

  Join those part files together using

dpkg split   join  foo* 

.

7.2 Debian claims to be able to update a running program; how is

this accomplished?

The kernel (file system) in Debian GNU/Linux systems supports replacing files even while

they're being used.