alpm-db-files(5) File Formats Manual alpm-db-files(5)

alpm-files - File format for listing files and directories contained in an alpm-package.

The alpm-files format is a textual format that lists the directories and files contained in a single alpm-package.

Such files are named files and are located in alpm-repo-database files as well as libalpm databases structures. They are created by package repository management software (such as dbscripts [1]). Package management software (e.g. pacman) uses them to list and query the paths of directories and files contained in a package file.

An alpm-files file is a UTF-8 encoded, newline-delimited file. It contains a single section header and zero or more section entries. Empty lines are ignored. Comments are not supported.

The first line must be the string literal `%FILES%`, which represents the section header.

All subsequent lines are interpreted as section entries, one per line, sorted in lexical order. Each section entry represents either a single file or directory path. The following formatting rules apply to the paths:

  • Directories are always listed with a trailing slash (`/`).
  • All paths are relative to the system root (i.e., `/usr/bin/foo` is represented as `usr/bin/foo`).

The following is an example of a alpm-files file for a package named `foo`:

%FILES%
usr/
usr/bin/
usr/bin/foo
usr/share/
usr/share/bash-completion/
usr/share/bash-completion/completions/
usr/share/bash-completion/completions/foo
usr/share/doc/
usr/share/doc/foo/
usr/share/doc/foo/README.md
usr/share/fish/
usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/
usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/foo.fish
usr/share/licenses/
usr/share/licenses/foo/
usr/share/licenses/foo/LICENSE-MIT
usr/share/zsh/
usr/share/zsh/site-functions/
usr/share/zsh/site-functions/_foo

The installed package will contain a binary (`usr/bin/foo`), a README file (`usr/share/doc/foo/README.md`), and a license file (`usr/share/licenses/foo/LICENSE-MIT`), among other files such as completion scripts for various shells.

libalpm(3), alpm-package(7), alpm-repo-database(7), pacman(8)

1.
dbscripts

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/dbscripts/