Assuming those are, in fact, more-or-less current Debian packages, they should be an ar archive, with two (gz-compressed) tarballs and a file that has no purpose other then to provide a nice magic number. They were designed to be easy to process with nothing but standard UNIX tools. It looks like this just splits out the ar archive. That should produce three files. debian-binary is there just to function as a magic number. control.tar.gz is metadata -- including a script (normaly sh or bash) that should be run on install, but you can probably ignore the whole file for your purposes. You may want to consider extending this to untar data.tar.gz and just ignore the two other files.

Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

In reply to Re: Installing Zaurus software by theorbtwo
in thread Installing Zaurus software by tye

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