The flar command is used to administer flash archives. A flash archive is an easily transportable version of a reference configuration of the Solaris operating environment, plus optional other software. Such an archive is used for the rapid installation of Solaris on large numbers of machines. You use the flarcreate(1M) to create a flash archive.

The flar command includes subcommands for extracting information, splitting archives, and combining them. Subcommands are indicated by the first option in a flar command line. These options are as follows:

-c

Combine the individual sections that make up an archive into the archive. If dir is specified (see -d option below), the sections will be gathered from dir; otherwise, they will be gathered from the current directory. Each section is assumed to be in a separate file, the names of which are the section names. At a minimum, the archive cookie (cookie), archive identification (identification), and archive files (archive) sections must be present. If archive is a directory, its contents are archived using cpio prior to inclusion in the archive. If so specified in the identification section, the contents are compressed.

Note that no validation is performed on any of the sections. In particular, no fields in the identification section are validated or updated. See flash_archive(4) for a description of the archive sections.

-i

Extract information on an archive. This subcommand is analogous to pkginfo.

-s

Split an archive into one file for each section of the archive. Each section is copied into a separate file in dir, if dir is specified (see -d option below), or the current directory if it is not. The files resulting from the split are named after the sections. The archive cookie is stored in a file named cookie. If section is specified (see -u option below), only the named section is copied.

The options for each subcommand are described below.

The options for flar -i (extract info) subcommand are as follows:

-k keyword

Only the value of the keyword keyword is returned.

-l

List all files in the archive. Does not process content from any sections other than the archive section.

The following are flar -i options used with tape archives:

-b blocksize

The block size to be used when creating the archive. If not specified, a default block size of 64K is used.

-p posn

Specifies the position on the tape device where the archive should be created. If not specified, the current position of the tape device is examined.

-t

The archive to be analyzed is located on a tape device. The path to the device is specified by outfile (see OPERANDS).

The options for flar -s and -c (split and combine archives) subcommands are as follows:

-d dir

Retrieve sections from dir, rather than from the current directory.

-f

(Used with -s only.) Extract the archive section into directory called archive, rather than placing it in a file of the same name as the section.

-S section

(Used with -s only.) Extract only the section named section from the archive.

-u section

Appends section to the list of sections to be included. The default list includes the cookie, identification, and archive sections. section can be a single section name or a space-separated list of section names.

The following options are used with tape archives (with both -c and -s):

-b blocksize

The block size to be used when creating the archive. If not specified, a default block size of 64K is used.

-p posn

Used only with -t. Specifies the position on the tape device where the archive should be created. If not specified, the current position of the tape device is used.

-t

Create an archive on or read an archive from a tape device. The outfile operand (see OPERANDS) is assumed to be the name of the tape device.

The following operand is supported:

outfile

Path to tape device if the -t option was used. Otherwise, the path to a flash archive.

The following exit values are returned for the -c and -s subcommands:

0

Successful completion.

>0

An error occurred.

The following exit values are returned for the -i subcommand:

0

Successful completion.

1

Command failed. If the -k option is used and the requested keyword is not found, flar returns 2.

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

flarcreate(1M), flash_archive(4), attributes(5)