Solaris checkinstall script did not complete successfully

This is another post about the usefulness of reading man pages and READMEs.
The other day I was patching a Solaris box and was greeted with the following error:

This appears to be an attempt to install the same architecture and version of a package which is already installed. This installation will attempt to overwrite this package.

/some_long_path_to/install/checkinstall: /some_long_path_to//install/checkinstall: cannot open
pkgadd: ERROR: checkinstall script did not complete successfully
Dryrun complete.
No changes were made to the system.

I was beating my head against the wall for quite a while before I decided to give “man patchadd” a try. Thankfully, the helpful paragraph was found in a wink of an eye:

pkgadd is invoked by patchadd and executes the installation scripts in the pkg/install directory. The checkinstall script is executed with its ownership set to user install, if there is no user install then pkgadd executes the checkinstall script as noaccess. The SVR4 ABI states that the checkinstall shall only be used as an information gathering script. If the permissions for the checkinstall script are changed to something other than the initial settings, pkgadd may not be able to open the file for reading, thus causing the patch installation to abort with the following error:

pkgadd: ERROR: checkinstall script did not complete successfully.

There is no need to tell, that after the patch was moved to another directory where user noaccess (didn’t have user install) had enough permissions the problem had gone.

Have safe and flawless patching!

Posted on February 21, 2015 at 3:47 pm by sergeyt · Permalink
In: Solaris

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  1. Written by manar
    on January 19, 2016 at 12:41 pm
    Reply ·