Cleaning up patch backout files

[Jerry K]

Thanks to PCI (Payment Card Industry), I have recently found myself in a 
place where I need to be able to clean up old patches on a large number 
of Sun servers.

A search of the archives turned up this this email (below) from 2003.

Fast forward (6) years, and given Solaris 10, I am curious what others 
are doing to clean up/out patches, after you have determined that you 
will not need to back out.

The link below is dead, and was not archived in the WayBack Machine... :(

Thanks for any replies, I will summarize.

Jerry






> Hello Guru's
> 
>  The email from Tim Villa below and the link provided by Alan Bradley state
> more-or-less the same thing: Just delete the save files to free up the
> space.
> 
> Alan's link is:
> 
> http://www.ucf.ics.uci.edu/pipermail/unix-admin/2002-September/001079.html
> 
> Tim's response and my original message below.
> 
> I just manually rm the directory in /var/sadm/pkg/PACKAGE/save, that's
> never done me any harm  :-) 
> 
> You'll want to find out all the packages a patch affects - you can get the
> patch install directory (just look up the SUNW* names really).
> 
> Tim
> 
> At 09:12 AM 18/02/2003 +0200, you wrote:
>> >Hi all,
>> >
>> >Does anybody know of a way to clean up the patch backout files and the
>> >showrev database?
>> >
>> >Once a 3rd or 4th instance of a patch has been applied over the previous
>> >ones, I'd like to remove some of the old backout files, but generally once
>> >I know that an applied patch does not have any adverse effects, I'd like
> to
>> >delete all the old files without creating stale / dead references anywhere
>> >(such as in the showrev database)
>> >
>> >Any alternative / similar ideas or solutions you use are welcome!