Re: dpkg: can a single file be extracted?

[and1000@cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly)]

In article <Pine.BSD/.3.91.960428190141.14640A-100000@saba.kuentos.guam.net> you write:
>Can you please provide an easy way to extract specified files from a 
>deb package?  Is there one already?
>
>I needed only one *.el from emacs-el-19.30.  In trying to get at this
>one file, it was necessary to extract the (about) 10MB of the package
>into a temporary directory.  I tried dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile, but this
>just seemed to extract the contents of the tar file to standard
>output.  It would have helped to have been able to extract a file, as
>one can do with tar files.  

Um, how about:

   dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile emacs.deb | tar -xvf - foo.el

This should extract foo.el from the .deb file. (You can specify a
shell glob pattern instead of just a single filename too).

I haven't actually tried this, but I imagine it should work.

Austin