Edit: The comments have been lost over the years. Some links no longer work.
Originally posted March 5, 2013 on AIXchange
My recent post about command line shortcuts generated some very good responses. For instance:
“The part about looping on a set of values reminded me of seq. I missed it from my Linux days, and so had written an imitation in perl before realizing that the AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications page has it packaged in the coreutils RPM.”
Another reader pointed out the apply command:
“I’m a fan of the least known command, apply. So for your first command:
apply “lscfg -vl fcs%1” 0 1 2 4 | grep Net
Be sure to read the other comments from that post for more great tips.
Incidentally, if you want to learn more about the apply command, look at the man pages. Run “man apply” on your AIX machine and you’ll see:
“The apply command runs a command string specified by the CommandString parameter on each specified value of the Parameter parameter in turn. Normally, Parameter values are chosen individually; the optional -Number flag specifies the number of Parameter values to be passed to the specified command string. If the value of the Number variable is 0, the command string is run without parameters once for each Parameter value.
Notes:
Because pattern-matching characters in CommandString may have undesirable effects, it is recommended that complicated commands be enclosed in single quotation marks (‘ ‘). You cannot pass a literal % (percent sign) followed immediately by any number without using the -a flag.”
It seems wherever I go, I learn something new. I certainly learn from commenters on this blog, but throughout my career I’ve been fortunate enough to interact with others who’ve taught me simple tricks that have made my job easier. It’s truly one of my favorite things about my career choice.
For instance, there was the customer who informed me that you can move the Windows toolbar from the bottom of the screen to the right side. It takes some getting used to, but if you have a ton of applications open, this option really seems to make better use of your desktop space.
Another customer introduced me to a tool called launchy that I’ve come to love.
Long ago I learned that by running the following from your VIO client…
#lspath -F “name path_id parent connection status”
hdisk0 0 vscsi0 810000000000 Enabled
… you can map that output to your VIO server when you run lsmap –all.
Check it out. The LUN information in your lsmap output…
LUN 0x8100000000000000
… directly corresponds to the lspath information above. This is another way to map disks from the VIO client to the VIO server.
As others have taught me, I’ve tried to return the favor by writing about some lesser-known tools that I’ve relied on over the years. Two of my favorites have always been VNC and screen, but of course the list has grown through time. Back in 2009 I pointed out some other useful tools.So let’s revisit that discussion. Is there some undeveloped (or unknown) capability that you’d like to see? And which desktop tools do you use now on a daily basis that you couldn’t live without?