One of the distinguishing features of Debian is it's package management system. Each software package is contained in a file whose name is of the form:

name_version.deb

where name is the name of the application and version is the version number.

The dpkg command provides the lowest level of package management. Other commands such as dselect provide package-management services which are more convenient to end users, but which are ultimately based on dpkg. The alien command is also available to enable the installation of Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware packages and/or the conversion of these packages to Debian format. Like package managers provided by other distributions, dpkg can be used to remove files associated with packages that are no longer needed.

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