Programmatically extracting .deb packages

Question

Hi to everyone, i've got a question and i hope someone will help me :)

I have .deb package which contents i need to extract. I need to do it programmatically. The problem is that i cannot find any valuable resources on the net which can help me. I really don't have any Linux (Unix) experience so maybe i'm searching for it in the wrong way.

My idea was to find some kind of a specification which will describe the whole extracting process. I found out that .deb packages are basically standard Unix ar archives so i tried to search how ar works but again - no success.

Please any help will be appreciated.

Thanks, Adi

EDIT: I want to implement it without using system commands or 3rd party libraries.

Answer 1

Quite simple, actually.

ar xv [name of deb file]

To call from within C, you could use system:

system("ar xv [name of deb file]");

Answer 2

If you don't find a library for this (I didn't, either), and cannot resort to running system commands, you can always implement your own to read ar archives. The ar file format isn't terribly complicated.