deb-view presents the contents of debian package archive files for viewing. The viewing is done with emacs tar-mode, with a few enhancements for viewing compressed files and HTML files, and formatting man pages. Usage: In dired, press ^d on the dired line of the .deb file to view. Or, execute: ESC x deb-view RET, and enter the .deb file name at the prompt. You are shown two tar files in tar-mode (see tar-mode for help). In the case of old .deb format files, the control info is shown but not the other files of control.tar, such as install scripts. Additional features that deb-view adds to tar-mode: q - kill both view buffers (INFO and DATA) and return to the dired buffer if that's where you executed deb-mode. v - executes deb-view-tar-view instead of tar-view, with the additional smarts to uncompress .gz and .Z files for viewing. N - Like in dired, formats man pages for viewing, with the additional smarts to uncompress .gz and .Z man files for viewing. W - use w3-mode to view an HTML file. These functions are also available in tar-mode on real tar files when deb-view is loaded. To view files not supported by deb-view, such as graphics, use the copy command in tar-mode ("c") to copy the file to a temp directory. You can then do what you want to the file. The normal editing and saving features of tar-mode are not supported by deb-view. Don't even try (I didn't). deb-view extracts the control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz files from debian package and presents two buffers in tar-mode. See tar-mode for info. Required programs: ar, gzip. Optionally required programs: nroff for formatting man pages. Optionally required programs: dpkg-deb for old-style binary .deb files. Optionally required programs: w3-mode for viewing HTML pages. For new-style .deb files (2.0), dpkg-deb isn't used. Therefore deb-view should work on any platform with the ar command, although "ar -p" doesn't seem to work for .deb files on Solaris 2.4 and 2.5. It works on SGI's IRIX 6.1 and 6.2, and Linux, of course. Old-style .deb files require the dpkg-deb program. I don't know how to extract control.tar.gz from these deb files, so you only get to see the package control file, but nothing else such as the install scripts. If you know how to get the control.tar.gz file out, let me know! The data file is still viewable thanks to the "dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile" option.