Decompress a .deb package

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With the help of dpkg-deb, you can decompress a .deb package simply like this:

caw:~/usr/sbin# dpkg -S /usr/bin/dpkg-deb
dpkg: /usr/bin/dpkg-deb
caw:~# dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile cfengine3_3.0.2+dfsg-2_amd64.deb | tar xvf -
./
./usr/
./usr/share/
./usr/share/doc/
./usr/share/doc/cfengine3/
./usr/share/doc/cfengine3/README.Debian
./usr/share/doc/cfengine3/changelog.gz
...

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Dont forget that the way to decompress a RPM package:

$ rpm -cpio abc.rpm | cpio -idm