Anyone good with dpkg/apt

Seth Cohn sethcohn at gnuhampshire.org
Wed Mar 21 14:33:32 EDT 2007


In addition to all of the other answers already given, it's also good
to note that all debs have a file which is generated upon
installation:

/var/lib/dpkg/info/[packagename].list

Just view that, and it's the list of what files are(were) in the package.

Prior to installation, the deb file (which as noted already is really
an ar file, NOT tar)
has 2 main parts (and one minor part) to it:  the data.tar.gz which
contains the various files
of the package itself and the control.tar.gz which contains the debian
control files:

./postinst  - how to install
./postrm  - how to remove
./md5sums - md5 checksums of all files
./control - info file about the deb

(The minor part is the debian-binary file)

So there are at least 2 other ways to get a ready made list using
standard tools if the package isn't installed yet.

1) ar -x packagename.deb; tar tvfz data.tar.gz
or
2) ar -x packagename.deb; tar xvfz control.tar.gz md5sums; cat md5sums

Neither is purely a list of just filenames (unlike the .list file
above), but that exercise is left to the reader, as is cleanup of the
debris afterward.


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