How to Analyze Your System to Obtain the List of Patches to Apply

You can perform an analysis of your system to determine the list of appropriate patches. This list is in an order that can be used to apply patches. You can also supply a list of one or more patches as input to restrict the analysis to just those patches. In addition to performing the analysis, you can save the patch list for modification or later use.

The system analysis writes the list of patches to standard output, so you can save the contents of the patch list to a file by redirecting standard output to a file.

Each line in a patch list has two columns. The first column is the patch ID, and the second column is a synopsis of that patch.

If you supply a list of one or more patches to the smpatch analyze command, the list of patches is augmented with any patches that are required as dependencies.

Steps

1. Become an appropriately authorized user or assume a role that includes the Software Installation profile or the solaris.admin.patchmgr.* authorization.

   The System Administrator profile includes the appropriate profiles. To create the role and assign the role to a user, see Configuring RBAC (Task Map) in System Administration Guide: Security Services.

2. Perform a patch analysis of your system and optionally save the list of patches in a file.

   • To create a list of all the appropriate patches for your system, type:

     # smpatch analyze

   • To create a list of particular patches for your system based on a patch list, type:

     # smpatch analyze -x idlist=patch-list-file

   • To create a list of particular patches for your system, type:

     # smpatch analyze -i patch-id...

Example 52 Analyzing Your System to Obtain the List of Patches to Apply

The following example shows how to analyze a system to create a list of all appropriate patches. The list is written to the /tmp/patch.all file.

# smpatch analyze > /tmp/patch.all

The following example shows how to create a list of patches, plist, modify it, and resolve the patch dependencies. The list is written to the /tmp/patch.plist file.

# smpatch analyze > plist
# vi plist
.
.
.
# smpatch analyze -x idlist=plist > /tmp/patch.plist

The following example shows how to resolve patch dependencies for patch 112785-28 and write the resulting patch list to a file called /tmp/patch.out. Patch 112785-28 depends on patch 113096-03. After running the smpatch analyze command, the patch.out file contains this ordered list: 113096-03 and 112785-28.

# smpatch analyze -i 112785-28 > /tmp/patch.out