Installing bash on an AIX 7.1 server
I’ve recently started managing a number of AIX hosts, which use ksh as their default shell. I don’t have anything against ksh, but I’ve spent a ton of time working with bash and have become extremely proficient with it. Given that, I like it to be part of all of my system builds. To make myself more at home on my AIX machines, I went ahead and installed bash on each host. This was super easy.
First I located the “AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications for POWER Systems”. This CD contains a bunch of GNU packages which can be installed with the rpm utility. To install bash, I changed to the ppc directory on the DVD and ran rpm with the install option:
$ cd /mnt/RPMS/ppc
$ rpm -ivh bash-3.2-1.aix5.2.ppc.rpm
After the package was installed I was able to type bash and marvel in its awesomeness. :)
Configuring a user to use the bash shell on an AIX server on July 11th, 2012
[...] wrote previously about my experience installing bash on my AIX hosts. After I installed the package I wanted to make it my default shell. I fired up usermod but was [...]