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HO M E > O P ERA TI NG SYSTEM S > A I X > C HEA T SHEET FO R A I X U SER- RELA TED C O M M A NDS

Cheat Sheet for AIX User-related Commands

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AIX handles user activities differently than other UNIXes [Infographic]

Mel Beckman | POWER I T Pro
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Nov. 16, 2012

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This cheat sheet gives you a quick guide to the differences betw een user adm inistration com m ands on
AIX and other UNIX-derived operating system s.

Many administration activities that work on other UNIXderived operating systems, such as Linux and Solaris, work
without change on AIX. But user administration
commands are an exception. IBM has its own unique
commands that operate similarly to legacy UNIX, but you
have to know the equivalents. For example, rather than the
UNIX standard "adduser" command, AIX has "mkuser."
This cheat sheet gives you a quick guide to the differences
so that you can exploit user administration tools and
techniques you find in user forums and elsewhere on the web.
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AIX User-Related Commands

Download AIX UserRelated Commands
(Infographic) today! This
quick guide highlights
differences between user
administration commands
on AIX and other UNIXderived operating systems.

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Download AIX User-Related

Commands (Infographic) today!
This quick guide highlights
differences between user
administration commands
on AIX and other UNIXderived operating systems.

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OCT . 2 3 , 2 0 1 3

Notes of POWER Interest from the IBM 3Q 2013

Financial Report
In last w eek's conference call w ith investors, IBM's
Senior Vice President and CFO of Finance and Enterprise
Transformation Mark Loughridge reported on IBM's third

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Cheat Sheet for AIX User-related Commands | AIX content from PowerITPro
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quarter performance for 2013. In this quarter's report,

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IBM Pow er Systems revenue dropped off a cliff, landed

in a lake, and sank like a stone. Loughridge that Pow er
revenue w as dow n 37 percent at constant currency,
w ith High Performance Computing accounting for 10

Here's a list of the most common UNIX user commands and their AIX equivalents:
Function

UNIX Command

percent of the decline....More

AIX Command

BLOG

OCT . 9 , 2 0 1 3

Create a user

useradd

mkuser

IBM Announces New

Integrated Facility for
Linux on Power

Change a user

usermod

chuser

Erw in Earley highlights the

Delete a user

userdel

rmuser

Change user's shell

usermod -s

chsh or passwd -s

Lock a user's account

passwd -l

chuser login=false

new Pow er Integrated

Facility for Linux (Pow er IFL) and the associated IBM Lab
Services announcement and discusses the benefits they

Other useroriented

bring to Pow er customers....More

BLOG

commands are nearly the same on AIX as its UNIX brethren:

Function

AIX Command

Change password

passwd

Display current user details

whoami

List users currently logged in

who or w

OCT . 8 , 2 0 1 3

LPI Exam 103.2:

Process Text
Streams Using Filters
Objective 103.2 of the
Linux Professional
Institute Certification exam covers a number of
commands that are commonly used for processing
textual input and output....More
PREV

One thing AIX is famous for is giving administrators powerful commands that other
UNIX variants lack. For user admin, AIX has the following unique yet useful commands.
For example, to list all the users on the system, UNIX admins can only dump the
/etc/passwd file. And to add or remove a users from a privilege control file, such as
/etc/ftpusers, standard UNIX calls for directly editing the fileintroducing the possiblity
of devastating syntax errors. AIX has dedicated commands for these actions. Here's a
summary of AIX "power" user commands:

N EXT

eBooks & Training

DEC. 1 3 , 2 0 1 2
DA T A SHEET

Secrets of an AIX
Administrator
Dow nload this Tech

Function

AIX Command

List user account details

lsuser <username>

List all users

lsuser ALL

Print a table of specific user attrbutes

lsuser -a ALL

Check integrity of user accounts

usrck -t ALL

Add or delete user in /etc/ftpusers file

ruser -a -f or ruser -d -f

Add or delete user in /etc/host.lpd file

ruser -a -p or ruser -d -p

Add or delete user in /etc/hosts.equiv file

ruser -a -c or ruser -d -c

dozen simple yet pow erful security topics that any IT pro

Show all users in /etc/ftpusers file

ruser -s -F (note upper-case)

similar collection of basic physics lectures by the brilliant

Show all users in /etc/host.lpd file

ruser -s -P (note upper-case)

Show all users in /etc/hosts.equiv file

ruser -s -R (note upper-case)

Advisor from POWER IT Pro and learn practical, realw orld information about AIX administration. Christian
Pruett shares all the things he w ishes he had know n
about AIX before becoming an admin in his ebook Secrets
of an AIX Administrator....More
LINK

DEC. 1 1 , 2 0 1 2

Six Easy Pieces on IT

Security
The six articles in this
ebook present a half
can digest in lunchtime reading. The title comes from a
physicist and Nobel laureate Dr. Richard Feynman....More
DEC. 3 , 2 0 1 2
DA T A SHEET

AIX Security

Armed with this cheat sheet, you're ready to begin adapting scripts and tricks from other
UNIXes for your own AIX edification!

IBM i has extremely robust

intrinsic security, and
Linux, although much less secure than either AIX or IBM i,

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has many more eyes w atching for problems. But AIX has
some significant corner cases w here security can be

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breached if you're not careful....More

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