How can I view the contents of an .ipk on Ubuntu 16.04?

Question

When I try to open an .ipk file with Archive Manager on Ubuntu 16.04 I get "Archive type not supported.". This didn't happen on Ubuntu 12.04.

What alternatives do I have to inspect the contents of an .ipk?

Solution 1

.ipk files are archives containing among other things other archives named control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. To extract the contents of an archive named archive-name.ipk change directories using cd to the directory containing archive-name.ipk and run the following commands:

ar -xv archive-name.ipk # results of this command are shown in the below screenshot 
tar -zxf control.tar.gz  
tar -zxf data.tar.gz  

Solution 2

dpkg -c <ipk_file>

or

dpkg-deb -c <ipk_file>

will help you list the contents of ipk archive.