Often you want to install some package in OpenSolaris but you don't know its name. It happens to me almost all the time - I know the binary I need (e.g. javac) but I have no idea in which package to find it. Honestly, the package names in OpenSolaris are not very easy to guess and right now I don't know about an online repository where to search for packages according to their contents (like I would use in case of Linux). 

However there is a way how to search for a package according to its contents right from OpenSolaris - you don't even need to open a web browser! Just run the following command:

$ pkg search -r [filename]

For example if you want to find the name of the package which contains the "whereis" binary, just run:

$ pkg search -r whereis

You get a list of all packages that contain the "whereis" file or folder. This is what you get when searching for whereis:

roman@opensolaris:~$ pkg search -r whereis
INDEX      ACTION    VALUE                     PACKAGE
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.79
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.86
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.86
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.75
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.89
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.90
basename   file      usr/ucb/whereis           pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.91

To install the latest version of the package you can simply run now 

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWscp

If you want to request a specific version, run the install command with full IPS package name, e.g.:

$ pfexec pkg install pkg:/SUNWscp@0.5.11-0.91

You will sometimes see multiple packages - e.g. in case of Apache there are these packages available in the main IPS repository: SUNWapch, SUNWapch2 and SUNWapch22.

To find out more about any of the packages (is it installed? which version? where does it come from? how big is it? etc.), you can run:

$ pkg info [package name]

To query the remote package repositories, you can use the -r option again:

$ pkg info -r [package name]

Here's an example - I can verify whether the SUNWscp package has been installed: