If you are in charge of administering Solaris machines, you might want to take a look at PCA – Patch Check Advanced.

From its Web page:

pca is a perl script which generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads and installs patches. By default, if run without any option or operand, pca shows a list of all patches which are not installed in their most recent revision.

The output of the pkginfo, showrev and uname commands is used to gather information about the system. Sun offers a patch cross-reference file called patchdiag.xref which contains information about all available patches. This file is downloaded by pca automatically to /var/tmp/ and kept up-to-date. If the file exists and is not writable, pca uses it and won’t try to update it.

The beauty of pca lies in its simplicity and effectiveness. I’ve always found Solaris patching procedures to be complicated, hard to automate and well beyond patching of GNU/Linux systems. Even Windows and Mac OS X systems are easier to patch than Solaris, in my opinion. I think that pca pretty much closes the gap. Kudos to Martin Paul for creating and maintaining pca.