Re: Another dpkg or apt-get question from a new user

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

Phillip Deackes <gsmh@gmx.li> wrote:
>"Maury R. Merkin" <merkin@his.com> wrote:
>> [How] can I get a listing of the files installed with a package?
>> 
>> I.e., if package dork.deb was installed on my box last week, can I see
>> what files were installed?  If so, how?
>
>You might be interested to know that:
>
>If you install an app with apt-get then the .deb will be saved to
>/var/cache/apt/archives
>
>If you then click on that .deb using GMC (the default Gnome file
>manager) the contents will be opened up as if the .deb were a directory.
>Very neat. If you don't use Gnome, then mc (Midnight Commander) will do
>a similar thing.
>
>I find thsi useful because it is easy to read docs etc. before the
>package is installed.

If you're more of a command-line fan, you can also do tricks like this:

# List files in a .deb
dpkg --fsys-tarfile foo.deb | tar t
# Extract a file from a .deb to standard output and run it through a
# decompressing pager. The initial . is necessary, though if the .deb
# was generated with some other version of tar you might need to omit
# the initial ./ instead.
dpkg --fsys-tarfile foo.deb | \
  tar xO ./usr/share/doc/foo/changelog.Debian.gz | zless

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]