No, I’m not talking about the Presbyterian Church in America, I’m talking about Patch Check Advanced.
PCA is the Solaris analog to Fedora’s YUM[1], Debian’s APT[2], or even FreeBSD’s Ports[3]. It basically allows you to completely skirt Sun’s bloated, kludgy GUI-based software update checker and list, download and even install all pending patches available for your Sun machines. It’s a self-contained Perl script that can self-update and contains an entire manpage embedded within the script itself. It works regardless of your architecture (x86, Sparc, etc.) and simply requires a Sunsolve account in order to download patches (listing available patches appears to be a for-free sort of thing).
Go grab it, then simply run `pca -l` to see all currently-available patches for your box or `pca -l all` to see all of your installed packages, regardless of their update status.
Very useful, and extremely easy to use. Go grab it immediately (well, after you’ve installed Blastwave’s pkg-get and the wget available from BW — PCA really likes to have wget in place in order to do any of the fancy-dance downloading). You’ll thank me later.
