When Solaris 10 was initially released, it came with a new utility called smpatch. It worked quite well, as long as you did not mind the multiple reboots and long patching times. Sometime after the initial release Sun decided to enforce authentication for smpatch, and this seem to break the entire patching system for about two months. I was doing a major install at the time, and I was not a happy camper.
Anyway, I stoically pushed on using smpatch, and using cluster patches when smpatch totally fell down. Now, I had read about a perl script that a number of people were using called pca, Patch Check Advanced.
http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/
The script works quite well, although large patches will not give any screen output until they are done, sometime that can be 10-15 minutes. pca will also automatically take care of dependencies.
You probably want to put the patches into their own directory, so we have put "pca" into ~root. Now you can:
cd /root/patches/ ../pca -d missingsr
Download missing (uninstalled) patches that are security (s) or required (r)
I *strongly* suggest going to single user mode to install patches.
./pca -i missingsr
If patchadd / pca says you need a reconfigure reboot, use
touch /reconfigure; init 6
This should get you started, more details on the pca web page.