Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Concatenating DVD iso parts for Solaris downloads

Is seems that every time a new Solaris Express release comes out, someone complains about having to unzip, then concatenate the iso image file parts for the DVD. They complain either that it needs more disk space or more disk bandwidth.

Leaving aside the reasons for the split in the first place, it's pretty easy to unzip and concatenate the parts in one go. In a bourne shell derivative, for example:

for file in sol-nv-b53-sparc-dvd-iso-*
do
echo Doing $file >&2
unzip -p $file
done > sol-nv-b53-sparc-dvd.iso

Now, please verify the md5 sum of the file. Many problems are flushed out by doing that:
On solaris:
digest -a md5 sol-nv-b53-sparc-dvd.iso

Or more generally
openssl md5 sol-nv-b53-sparc-dvd.iso