If you need to manipulate a Java archive such as a jar or war, and do not have access to the jar utility (it only comes packaged with the JDK, not JRE), you can always use the standard GNU zip/unzip utilities.
Although there are utilities such as dpkg-deb for managing .deb packages, they can also be manipulated by the standard set of archival utilities: tar, ar, and gzip. This article will lead you through extracting the contents of a .deb file, making modifications to the installation scripts and default configuration files, then repackaging.
If you are using zip and find yourself needing to exclude a directory (.git, build, etc), the “-x” exclude switch can provide that functionality. Take the following directory structure: $ find . . ./two.txt ./skipme ./skipme/three.txt ./one.txt You can exclude the entire ‘skipme’ folder and everything in it with: zip -r myzip.zip * -x skipme/*