What happens to previous patch when new patch is installed

[Purusa]

I applied new patches for the HPUX machine.
Generally if I do
#swlist for an existing patch Id ,I get

Initializing...
# Contacting target
Followed by Patch desc etc..

If I do
#swlist
for a Patch Id which is not installed,I get

Initializing...
# Contacting target
Followed by
ERROR message....

But presently I have installed New patches on a workstation on which previous patches were already installed and when I do
#swlist
for a Patch Id which was there earlier,I get

Initializing...
# Contacting target
Followed by
# i.e I return to the prompt again

What does this mean?
Has the previous patch been deleted and some reference to it kept?
What else does it convey?

Thanx in advance for your response.

[Tim D Fulford]

Hi

I'm not so sure I undersrand your question. If you apply a new patch that superceeds an old patch the binbaries are overwritten. HOWEVER, you can (the default) keep the old patch information. This means you can remove (swremove) the new patch & you will be cak to where you were. It is reccomended that you keep the old patch information for this reason.

If you do "swlist -l product", you will see all the patches on the system. It will contain ALL patches applied (old & new). If you have 3 patches for the same description only the most recent will be active.

Regards

Tim

[Bernhard Mueller]

Tim is right, swlist should list superseded patches as will.

maybe you can check that in your /var/adm/sw/defaults file
you do NOT have a line like
patch_save_files=false

(by default this default file has only comment lines)

Regards,
Bernhard

[Con O'Kelly]

Hi

I'd also have a look at the show_patches & check_patches commands that are available on 11.x

# show_patches -a
Lists all active patches on the system.

I think there's a doco in /usr/share/doc that details patch management for 11.x. I'm not logged on so can't check.

Cheers
Con

[Purusa]

Hi all,
Thanx for your responses.
I have a small issue.
after upgrading to new patches, for few old patches i am getting warnings that these patches are not installed while for few others i am not getting any warnings.

Can you let me know any reason for this warning/error messages?

[doug mielke]

Maybe it's time to run the cleanup command to remove patches that have been superceded

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Pankaj,

swlist by itself will only show bundles & products. Use the following:

swlist -l patch

to show all current patches installed.

You can get even more detail with:
swlist -l fileset

Superseded patches are moved to /varadmsw/save until they are removed via the cleanup command.

HTH,
Jeff

[Caesar_3]

Hello!

In most cases the patches and other programs
that upgrated are saved and if you want
to remove this saves then you can use command
called cleanup that remove them.

Caesar

[RAC_1]

That may be because of superceded patches.

Use show_patches, check_patches ,cleanup (in preview mode) to check that.

[RolandH]

See this document I have attached and specially the "patch rollback" chapter.


Roland