Summary: Problems with Solaris Software Registry

Hi all,

it seems that there exists no practicable solution for my problem. Thanks
to Casper for your support.

- If I edit the file by hand and remove the corrupted entries, this would
lead to a lack of information and is not a practicable solution.
- Leaving this file as it is  will cause the situation that you are not
able to add/remove Packages/Patches to the system.

To repair the corrupted file we finally re-installed the System and always
had a look at the contents-file.

Christian



======================== old mail =====================

I have a problem with the Solaris software registry running on a Sun V280R,
Solaris 5.8 installed. Additional Software is Solstice DiskSuite and
Oracle.

The file "/var/sadm/install/contents" seems to be corrupt. Whenever I try
to run "pkginfo -l <any-package>", I get the following
error messages:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
pkginfo: ERROR: bad entry read in contents file
    pathname: /opt/S755
    problem: unknown ftype
--------------------------------------------------------------------

It does not matter which package I use, the key point is the "-l" option
with the command. If I only type "pkginfo <any-package>" I get a short info
about the package, this way goes right.

So after that I had a deeper look into "/var/sadm/install/contents" and it
seems that some of the entries are corrupted.
For example if I search for the corrupt entrie "/opt/S755" I can see that
this entry is not made in the way the other entries are, it seems that
there is some information broken.
If I remove this entrie and restart the "pkginfo" command, this failure
does not appear any more (good), but the next failure/bad entrie appears
(bad).

In this way it goes through the whole file! I can not work through it and
delete every corrupt entrie because in this way I will delete a kind of
information for the system, too.
But I believe that I will get in serious trouble when trying to patch this
machine or add new packages...


So do anybody know a way how I can re-create/re-initialize/update my
software registry file?

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