Installed Products Database

Software Distributor commands keep track of installations, products, and filesets on the system with the Installed Product Database (IPD). Located in the directory /var/adm/sw/products, the IPD is a series of files and subdirectories that contain information about all the products that are installed under the root directory (/). This information includes all the attributes describing the products, filesets, and files. The swinstall, swconfig, and swremove tasks automatically add to, change, and delete this IPD information as the commands are executed.

You cannot manually edit the IPD files, but swmodify lets you change local IPD and local depot catalog information.

The equivalent IPD files for a depot are called catalog files. When a depot is created or modified using swcopy, catalog files are built (by default in /var/spool/sw/catalog) that describe the depot and its contents.

The IPD also contains a swlock file that manages simultaneous read and/or write access to software objects, and ACLs.

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