Hehehe, lots of responses there. =)
AIX is IBM UNIX; it's the OS you run on an IBM RS/6000, which is a UNIX
server-type that covers a load of architectures. See www.rs6000.ibm.com for
the latest sales pitch. I work for The Coca-Cola Company (main HQ in
Atlanta) and we have around 200 of these on-site, and approximately 15
people to support them. Whee!
The term 'ksh' is the Korn Shell written by David(?) Korn and is the default
shell for AIX. I hear it works "better" than csh and sh by combining the
best of both. Never really used csh or sh, or bash for that matter, so that
may be a matter of opinion. As a UNIX shell, it doubles as a programming
language that deals with text strings. If you don't ever use UNIX I
wouldn't bother buying a book. =)
The term 'awk' refers to another programming language written by three guys
whose names escape me at the moment. It is also a text-oriented thing (at
least the way I use it, no arrays for me, thank you very much). I usually
use it to do simple things like print a specific field from another
program's output, like so:
ps -ef|grep oracle|awk $1 #this will print the first field (hopefully the
process ID) of oracle processes
Let's see... "sed" is a line editor and if you can use it then your life
will be a lot easier when doing awk, vi and scripting in general. It uses
regular expressions just like the rest of the world (should). I usually
just do something easy in vi (instead of using sed itself) like:
:%s/OLDPATTERN/NEWPATTERN/g # this replaces all occurences of OLDPATTERN
with NEWPATTERN
And finally, my favorite: smit = System Management Interface Tool. This is
an IBM product that comes with AIX and essentially is a menu-driven command
builder. It is well-built and a vital tool for the AIX beginner. Once you
get to the menu where you fill out your data and are ready to make your
change or whatever, pressing F6 will show you the command it has built. smit
itself just builds the command and runs it, and several of my scripts are
cut-n-paste from smit, then edit to do what I want. Very helpful for those
run-on commands; CnP to a file and you have an insta-script. =)
I'm not an expert in anything, BTW... I just do my job and have fun,
learning new stuff as I go. I saw several of the gurus here using perl for
various things and thought I should give it a try, maybe pad my resume more,
you know? But if anyone needs some AIX/RS6000 help I will do what I can.
Gary L. Armstrong
AIX Support Specialist
The Coca-Cola Company
