Command line editing and text editor on AIX

aixcommand lineeditorsksh

Recently my company is moving an application system from mainframe z/OS to AIX. I have some experience on Ubuntu, but am completely new to AIX 6.1.
Just wondering a few question:

We use putty to connect to the AIX servers, but putty is very difficult to operate. You cannot use up arrow to recall the command in history. Is there any better terminal that is more user friendly in AIX?
AIX is using ksh, instead of Bash. Is there any login shell with a special name that every time you login it can execute automatically, just like the .bashrc in ubuntu?
There's no gedit nor nano nor vim on my AIX, only vi. Is there any text editor that I can download/use without root permission?

Best Answer

The default login shell for AIX is not bash - it is ksh/posix. The reason why the "up" arrow isn't working is because KSH is set to "vi" mode (bash can do this too). You want "emacs" mode:

set -o emacs

The .bashrc equivalent is .profile. You can put the above in there to change it permanently. AIX actually gives you two versions of KSH - ksh88 (default) and ksh93. The latter supports .kshrc as well

You can also install bash (and vim, nano etc) on AIX using an RPM available from one of the publicly available repositories.

Related Solutions

Is the `ed` editor useful for any purpose besides emergencies and batch editing

As a general purpose editor, probably not, but as a way to get yourself out of a pinch, it's good to know a few basics. The good news is that if you know your way around vim, it's likely you can use that knowledge to blunder around in ed. The times are changing, but there are still systems that it might be your best editor or connection scenarios that call for it. I've used it from my super-slick smartphone logged into a modern linux box when the connection was bad enough that running a full editor was taking forever and I really needed to just change a line and get out.

Put tab before every output line on AIX/ksh

\t on the right hand side of a sed expression is not portable. Here are some possible solutions:

POSIX shell

Bear in mind that since many shells store their strings internally as cstrings, if the input contains the null character (\0), it may cause the line to end prematurely.

echo "something" | while IFS= read -r line; do printf '\t%s\n' "$line"; done

awk

echo "something" | awk '{ print "\t" $0 }'

Perl

echo "something" | perl -pe 'print "\t"'