Building a deb from installed files

I needed to create a deb of a currently installed package. I didn't have the original deb anymore but needed it so that I could use it for rolling back an upgrade in case of problems.

a google search for "create deb from installed" immediately pointed me at dpkg-repack


sudo apt-get dpkg-repack
sudo dpkg-repack


creates the deb file in the current directory. I don't know how complete that is, but it's certainly better than the nothing I had before.