Extracting Debian packages and moving all the executables to a folder

Question

I have thousands of Debian packages and I need to move all the executable files within those packages to one single directory. For a single package, I could use the ar command to extract package and then typical Debian package has a "data.tar.xz" file which actually contains the possible executables. I could then extract "data.tar.xz" using tar command and manually move the executables to new directory. It is a pain to do this for each package as there are thousands of packages and I was thinking to use a bash script to get the job done. My current directory structure looks like follows(only showed 3 packages here, all_executables is the directory to copy all the executables)

./git_2.28.0-1_armhf.deb
./libssm1-dbg_1.3-2.1_armhf.deb
./mariadb-client-core-10.0_10.0.28-2+b1_armhf.deb
 (the list goes on)
./all_executables

Once I extract a Debian package, every package usually have the same structure as follows-:

./control.tar.xz
./data.tar.xz
./debian-binary

Upon extracting data.tar.xz file there is few directories and these directories typically contains the executables. I need to copy these executables to one folder (all_executables). Could somebody help me to do this task. I am a beginner to bash and find being lost to get even started. Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

To begin, put this in a file called, say, script:

#!/bin/sh
for deb in "$@"
do
    ar x "$deb" ./data.tar.xz
    tar xvf data.tar.xz --transform='s|.*/||' --wildcards './usr/bin/*'
    rm ./data.tar.xz
done

To run it:

sh script /path/to/*.deb

The script will extract all contents of the /usr/bin/ directory of the tar file to your current directory.

You will want to tweak this:

1. If you have old .deb files, the executables may be in data.tar.gz instead of data.tar.xz.

2. From you comment, I gather there may be other files besides /usr/bin/* that interest you. They will have to be added to the command.

How it works

1. #!/bin/sh indicates the start of a shell script.

2. for deb in "$@"; do starts a loop over the arguments to the script.

3. ar x "$deb" ./data.tar.xz extracts the data.tar.xz file.

4. tar xvf data.tar.xz --transform='s|.*/||' --wildcards './usr/bin/*' extracts any file matching the glob ./usr/bin/* from data.tar.xz. x indicates extract. v (optional) indicates verbose. f data.tar.xz tells tar which file to extract from. So that every file is extracted into the current directory, -transform='s|.*/||' removes the directory names from the file to be extracted.

5. rm ./data.tar.xz removes the data.tar file after we are done with it.

6. done signals the end of the for loop.