AIX User-related Commands

Cheat Sheet for AIX User-related Commands

Many administration activities that work on other UNIX-derived 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.

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

Function	UNIX Command	AIX Command
Create a user	useradd	mkuser
Change a user	usermod	chuser
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

Other user-oriented 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

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 file—introducing the possiblity of devastating syntax errors. AIX has dedicated commands for these actions. Here's a summary of AIX "power" user commands:

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
Show all users in /etc/ftpusers file	ruser -s -F (note upper-case)
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)