For a few years, Solaris sported a nifty user command called admintool<\/tt>(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<\/tt>(1M) was replaced with solstice<\/tt>(1M), it was more extensible but low and behold that was soon replaced with the current Solaris Management Console (smc<\/tt>(1M)), however, solstice<\/tt> too used the backing admintool<\/tt> libraries.<\/p>\n
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<\/tt>(1M). This little command is all that’s left of the once very large and mighty admintool<\/tt> libraries. Though it’s certainly time for the libraries, and all last vestiges of solstice<\/tt> to leave the code base, but showrev<\/tt>(1M) should stick around a bit longer.<\/p>\n
Certainly the days of showrev<\/tt>(1M) should be numbered.All of its tasks are either obsolete, very weird, or better performed by other commands. So what’s a systems administrator, now developer left to do? Especially who’s tasked with getting rid of it’s backing libraries? Replace it with a very small shell script of course! This has been the source of a joke going around the Install Group here in Broomfield, thanks to this ThinkGeek shirt<\/a>.<\/p>\n So what’s the line count difference?<\/b> <\/center><\/p>\n Many goofy things exist in the old version of showrev<\/tt>(1M). The command dates from before 1991, as it was a command which was transitioned from the SunOS 4 days to Solaris; there’s even an ARC case from 1991 talking about moving it out of \/usr\/kvm<\/tt>, and another from 1995 talking about getting rid of it! Still, it does a few, now, very likely, little used things such as parsing a command’s ELF headers for comments (just with the use of lseek<\/tt>(2) and lib ELF), and showing a system’s OpenWindows version. However, now in this day and age of Solaris, all these, even rather odd features, can be implemented with various commands already available on the system.<\/p>\n Sadly, this begs the question, how long should this long lived command continue to live?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once the mighty end-all of patch checking, a very useful command showing ELF information, and a convenient way of getting a system’s OpenWindows version, now just a small shell script: showrev<\/tt>(1M).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clayb.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe old showrev<\/tt>(1M) was implemented in two files linked against the admintool<\/tt> libraries. Here are the sizes compared thanks to wc -l<\/tt>:
\n\n
\n Old:<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1,631<\/td>\n showrev.c<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 29<\/td>\n showrev.h<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 6,694<\/td>\n libadmagt<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 5,139<\/td>\n libadmsec<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 16,507<\/td>\n libadmapm<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1,746<\/td>\n libadmapp<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 31,746<\/u><\/b><\/td>\n total<\/u><\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n New:<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n 260<\/td>\n showrev.ksh<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 260<\/u><\/b><\/td>\n total<\/u><\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n