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NAME | DESCRIPTION | SYNTAX | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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deb822(5) dpkg suite deb822(5)
deb822 - Debian RFC822 control data format
The package management system manipulates data represented in a
common format, known as control data, stored in control files.
Control files are used for source packages, binary packages and
the .changes files which control the installation of uploaded
files (dpkg's internal databases are in a similar format).
A control file consists of one or more stanzas of fields (the
stanzas sometimes used to be referred to as paragraphs). The
stanzas are separated by empty lines. Parsers may accept lines
consisting solely of U+0020 SPACE and U+0009 TAB as stanza
separators, but control files should use empty lines. Some
control files allow only one stanza; others allow several, in
which case each stanza usually refers to a different package.
(For example, in source packages, the first stanza refers to the
source package, and later stanzas refer to binary packages
generated from the source.) The ordering of the stanzas in
control files is significant.
Each stanza consists of a series of data fields. Each field
consists of the field name followed by a colon (U+003A ‘:’), and
then the data/value associated with that field. The field name is
composed of US-ASCII characters excluding control characters,
space, and colon (i.e., characters in the ranges U+0021 ‘!’
through U+0039 ‘9’, and U+003B ‘;’ through U+007E ‘~’, inclusive).
Field names must not begin with the comment character (U+0023
‘#’), nor with the hyphen character (U+002D ‘-’).
The field ends at the end of the line or at the end of the last
continuation line (see below). Horizontal whitespace (U+0020
SPACE and U+0009 TAB) may occur immediately before or after the
value and is ignored there; it is conventional to put a single
space after the colon. For example, a field might be:
Package: dpkg
the field name is Package and the field value dpkg.
Empty field values are only permitted in source package control
files (debian/control). Such fields are ignored.
A stanza must not contain more than one instance of a particular
field name.
There are three types of fields:
simple
The field, including its value, must be a single line.
Folding of the field is not permitted. This is the
default field type if the definition of the field does not
specify a different type.
folded
The value of a folded field is a logical line that may
span several lines. The lines after the first are called
continuation lines and must start with a U+0020 SPACE or a
U+0009 TAB. Whitespace, including any newlines, is not
significant in the field values of folded fields.
This folding method is similar to RFC5322, allowing
control files that contain only one stanza and no
multiline fields to be read by parsers written for
RFC5322.
multiline
The value of a multiline field may comprise multiple
continuation lines. The first line of the value, the part
on the same line as the field name, often has special
significance or may have to be empty. Other lines are
added following the same syntax as the continuation lines
of the folded fields. Whitespace, including newlines, is
significant in the values of multiline fields.
Whitespace must not appear inside names (of packages,
architectures, files or anything else) or version numbers, or
between the characters of multi-character version
relationships.
The presence and purpose of a field, and the syntax of its
value may differ between types of control files.
Field names are not case-sensitive, but it is usual to
capitalize the field names using mixed case as shown below.
Field values are case-sensitive unless the description of the
field says otherwise.
Stanza separators (empty lines) and lines consisting only of
U+0020 SPACE and U+0009 TAB, are not allowed within field
values or between fields. Empty lines in field values are
usually escaped by representing them by a U+0020 SPACE
followed by a dot (U+002E ‘.’).
Lines starting with U+0023 ‘#’, without any preceding
whitespace are comments lines that are only permitted in
source package control files (debian/control) and in
deb-origin(5) files. These comment lines are ignored, even
between two continuation lines. They do not end logical
lines.
All control files must be encoded in UTF-8.
RFC822, RFC5322.
This page is part of the dpkg (Debian Package Manager) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=dpkg⟩. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨git
clone https://git.dpkg.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-06.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
1.22.0-52-g1af0 2023-08-30 deb822(5)
Pages that refer to this page: deb-buildinfo(5), deb-changelog(5), deb-changes(5), deb-control(5), deb-src-control(5), dsc(5)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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