deb-md5sums(5)

deb-md5sums5

Package md5 file digests

Usage

DEBIAN/md5sums

Overview

A package declares the MD5 digests for the package file contents by including an md5sums file in its control archive (i.e. DEBIAN/md5sums during package creation). This file is used for integrity verification and deduplication purposes, and not for any kind of security purpose.

This file contains a list of MD5 digests (as 32 case-insensitive hexadecimal characters) followed by two spaces (U+0020 SPACE) and the absolute pathname of a plain file, one per line.

Trailing slashes (U+002F /) in the pathname will be trimmed. Neither trailing whitespace nor empty or whitespace-only lines are accepted.

If the control file does not exist in the binary package, dpkg(1) will generate the matching information at unpack time (since dpkg 1.16.3).

Examples

 53c0d4afe4bc4eccb5cb234d2e06ef4d  usr/bin/dpkg
 f8da2bc74cdcad8b81c48a4f0d7bb0a8  usr/bin/dpkg-deb
 70b913132de56e95e75de504979309b4  usr/bin/dpkg-divert
 […]

Releases

3 releases since Debian 12 (Bookworm); the text changed 2 times.

  1. 12
  2. 13
  3. Arch

From dpkg 1.23.11-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.