extracting from debian package?

[Jorge Almeida]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, C M Reinehr wrote:

> On Friday 16 February 2007 11:25, Jorge Almeida wrote:
>> I downloaded a debian package, which must contain some text files I want
>> to look at. I don't have a debian system, and I don't care for the
>> binaries, only text files.
>>
>> $ file runit-services_0.2.3_all.deb
>> runit-services_0.2.3_all.deb: Debian binary package (format 2.0)
>>
>> Is there any way at all to achieve this?
>
> Shouldn't be a problem. According to the manual .deb files are ar archives so
> you should be able to unpack the archive with whatever tool unpacks ar
> archives. Within the archive are three files: control.tar.gz, data.tar.gz, &
> debian-binary. What you want should be in data.tar.gz.
>
That's it, thanks. Thanks to Leon and Lonni, too. (I knew about the
existence of alien, but didn't find a man page on-line. Maybe I didn't
search enough. In my system, there were 6 dependencies to install!)
-- 
Jorge