For a few years, Solaris sported a nifty user command called admintool(1M). This used to be my friend when I started doing system administration around 1997 on Solaris 2.5.1, but slowly the tack at Sun changed and admintool(1M) was replaced with solstice(1M), it was more extensible but low and behold that was soon replaced with the current Solaris Management Console (smc(1M)), however, solstice too used the backing admintool libraries.
This certainly makes sense from software engineering principles, as who wants to rewrite code you don’t have to? However, there was a small command many systems administrators know and love for its patching knowledge caught up in these libraries too. This command was showrev(1M). This little command is all that’s left of the once very large and mighty admintool libraries. Though it’s certainly time for the libraries, and all last vestiges of solstice to leave the code base, but showrev(1M) should stick around a bit longer.
Certainly the days of showrev(1M) should be numbered. Continue reading “Removing AdminTool and replacing what’s left with a very small shell script”