Put tab before every output line on AIX/ksh

aixkshsed

0:root@SERVER:/root # echo "something" | sed -e 's/^/\t/g'
tsomething
0:root@SERVER:/root #

AIX/ksh .. why doesn't it works? I just want to put a "tab" before every line!

Best Answer

\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"'

Related Solutions

Shell – Skip first 3 bytes of a file

Old school — you could use dd:

dd if=A_FILE bs=1 skip=3

The input file is A_FILE, the block size is 1 character (byte), skip the first 3 'blocks' (bytes). (With some variants of dd such as GNU dd, you could use bs=1c here — and alternatives like bs=1k to read in blocks of 1 kilobyte in other circumstances. The dd on AIX does not support this, it seems; the BSD (macOS Sierra) variant doesn't support c but does support k, m, g, etc.)

There are other ways to achieve the same result, too:

sed '1s/^...//' A_FILE

This works if there are 3 or more characters on the first line.

tail -c +4 A_FILE

And you could use Perl, Python and so on too.

How to set password for users in AIX using single line command

You can use chpasswd

The chpasswd command administers users' passwords. The root user can supply or change users' passwords specified through standard input. Each line of input must be of the following format.

username:password Only root users can set passwords with this command.

Example 1:

echo username:password | chpasswd

Example 2:

Also for security you can pass encrypted password to chpasswd

# Create Password in Encrpyted Form Using below command
# perl -e'print crypt("YourPassword", "salt")' ; echo -e

echo username:cryptedPass | chpasswd -e