Five commands at least from the default install of the
AIX toolbox (basically GNU and other open source tools compiled for Linux) fail to work as advertised, or sufficiently compatibly on AIX 5.3:
- kill - it, um, doesn't kill processes
- su - it, um, won't let you su
- uptime - it doesn't report the correct load averages
- hostname - doesn't support the '-s' switch to "Trim any domain information from the printed name"
- printf - seems to get confused with escape chars or octal encoding
In each case, if you remove the symlinks from
/usr/linux/bin and have this in your path, you can keep the defective binaries in
/opt/freeware/bin, and run the default AIX tools.
Luckily, tools such as
ls, du and
df work well, to give niceties such as directory colouring and file sizes in human readable units (-h).
