One useful operation out of many others is the handling of individual patches.
Say you just want to install the 147441-23 kernel patch.
You just need to:
# smpatch download -t -i 147441-23 > /tmp/README-147441-23
# smpatch download -i 147441-23
# smpatch add -i 147441-23
Patches that are marked interactive must be installed this way.
Until recently, this was the case for Live Upgrade own patches.