I'd like to install several unix utilities (incl. xmlstarlet, wget) on a solaris 10 machine which I don't have root access to (obviously, I have a user account). I'm not that experienced with solaris and am wondering if I can simply get hold of an uber binary for each utility I need and just place this in my home directory? Is this feasible?
Many thanks
As long as the binary doesn't try to do something that requires superuser privileges and the binary is compiled for your platform, you should be ok.
wget is installed by default on Solaris 10 in /usr/sfw/bin/wget.
xmlstarlet requires four libraries that aren't included in Solaris 10 so it's going to be trickier but of course, you can build them and then xmlstarlet from their respective source code.
Have a look there for information about what is needed: http://www.opencsw.org/packages/xmlstarlet
If you really don't want to compile the binaries, there is certainly a way to manually install the files stored on these Solaris packages elsewhere and patch/fix them to make the whole work. I did that already.
Finally, don't underestimate the willingness of the system administrator to help.