The allocate utility manages the ownership of devices through its allocation mechanism. It ensures that each device is used by only one qualified user at a time.

The device argument specifies the device to be manipulated. To preserve the integrity of the device's owner, the allocate operation is executed on all the device special files associated with that device.

The argument dev-type is the device type to be operated on and can only be used with the -g option.

The default allocate operation allocates the device special files associated with device to the uid of the current process.

If the -F option is specified, the device cleaning program is executed when allocation is performed. This cleaning program is found in /etc/security/lib. The name of this program is found in the device_allocate(4) entry for the device in the dev-exec field.

Only authorized users may allocate a device. The required authorizations are specified in device_allocate(4).

The following options are supported:

-g dev-type

Allocates a non-allocated device with a device-type matching dev-type.

-s

Silent. Suppresses any diagnostic output.

-F device

Reallocates the device allocated to another user. This option is often used with -U to reallocate a specific device to a specific user. Only a user with the solaris.devices.revoke authorization is permitted to use this option.

-U uname

Uses the user ID uname instead of the user ID of the current process when performing the allocate operation. Only a user with the solaris.devices.revoke authorization is permitted to use this option.

The following exit values are returned:

non--zero

An error occurred.

/etc/security/device_allocate

/etc/security/device_maps

/etc/security/dev/*

/etc/security/lib/*

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

deallocate(1), list_devices(1), bsmconv(1M), dminfo(1M), device_allocate(4), device_maps(4), attributes(5)

The functionality described in this man page is available only if the Basic Security Module (BSM) has been enabled. See bsmconv(1M) for more information.