How to handle Sun's .jar files

As part of Sun's campaign to slap the term 'java' on everything they produce, whether it pertains to java or not, the patch files that are downloaded from their website have a .jar extension, but the instructions on the webpage make no mention of this nor do they describe how work with them. Hint: running 'patchadd xxx.jar' won't work. As it turns out, .jar files are similar to .tar files. Use the jar command just as you would use the tar command to extract the files from the archive thusly:

jar xf xxxxxx.jar

where xxxxxx.jar is the file you just downloaded. See http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/jar/basics/index.html for a short explanation on using jar files.