Patches in Solaris: Install and uninstall

Some applications require a specific set of patches in order to function properly. To list the applied patches or to dertermine the presence of a specific patch, use the showrev command.

To list all patches applied to the system, run:

showrev -p


Output of this command can be piped to another application like more which will display the output one page at a time:

showrev -p | more


To look for the existence of a specific patch, you can pipe the output to grep and search for a patch-id pattern. If you require a specific patch like 113964-09, it is advisable to search for the base id 113964. The -09 following the base id is the version of the patch. To look for the existence and version of patch 113964, run:

showrev -p | grep 113964


Read through the results carefully since the output includes other patch-ids associated with the patch. Most of the time, software requires that the version of the applied patch be equal to or greater than the one specified. Refer to the documentation of the software for specific requirements.



By default, the files replaced by the application of a patch in Solaris are preserved to enable removal of the patch and restoration of the system to its pre-patched state.

To remove a typical patch, such as 116012-01, run this command as superuser:

patchrm 116012-01


If you specified a non-default backout directory during the patchadd process, you must specify that during the patch removal. If the backout directory was /var/tmp/patch/backout, then the removal command would be:

patchrm -B /var/tmp/patch/backout 116012-01


You must specify the fully qualified (absolute) path to the backout directory.

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