Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)

Merging Solaris Flash Archives

After you have split an archive into sections, you can combine the sections to create a new archive.

The flar combine command creates a Solaris Flash archive from individual sections. The following table describes how the flar command handles combining sections.

Conditions 

Description 

Minimum number of files 

Each section is assumed to be in a separate file, the names of which are the section names. These three files must be present:  

  • Archive cookie (cookie)

  • Archive identification (identification)

  • Archive files (archive)

Archive copy method 

If archive is a directory, the contents are archived before including the directory in the combined archive by using the cpio copy utility.

  • cpio is the default copy method. Individual file sizes cannot be greater than 4 GB.

  • pax is the copy method to handle large individual files. The flarcreate command with the -L pax option uses the pax utility to create an archive without limitations on individual file sizes. Individual file sizes can be greater than 4 GB.

Compressing an archive 

If the archive identification section specifies to compress the archive, flar compresses the contents of the newly combined archive.

Validation 

No validation is performed on any of the sections. In particular, no fields in the archive identification section are validated or updated. 

The following command syntax is for flar combine command.

flar combine [-d dir] [-u section] [-t [-p posn] [-b blocksize]] filename

-d dir

Retrieves the sections to combine from dir, rather than from the current directory.

-u section
  • If you use this option, flar copies the cookie, identification, archive, and section sections. You can specify a single section name or a space-separated list of section names.

  • If you do not use this option, flar copies the cookie, identification, and archive sections only.


Example 4–2 Merging a Solaris Flash Archive

In this example, an archive cookie section, an archive identification section, and an archive files section are combined to become a complete archive. The archive is named newarchive.flar.


# flar combine newarchive.flar 


Example 4–3 Merging a Solaris Flash Archive and Adding a User-Defined Section

In this example, an archive cookie section, an archive identification section, an archive files section, and a user-defined section are combined to become a complete archive. The archive is named newarchive.flar. The user-defined section content is in the file that is named user-defined, which is in the current directory.


# flar combine -u user_defined newarchive.flar