IBM PASE for i commands

Most PASE for i commands support the same options and provide the same behavior as AIX® commands. But PASE for i commands differ from AIX commands in some ways.

The following list describes the difference between PASE for i commands and AIX commands:

  • Many PASE for i commands for display operations and for UNIX jobs control work only in a teletypewriter (TTY) session, such as a session started by the aixterm or xterm command. These functions do not work on 5250 workstation devices (including the display presented by the QP2TERM program).
  • PASE for i generally does not support interfaces that are provided on AIX for system management. For example, PASE for i does not support the AIX System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) or functions that require an SMIT database.
  • The IBM® i operating system is fundamentally an EBCDIC system. PASE for i shells and utilities run in ASCII and generally do not perform automatic conversion of stream data. You might need to use tools (for example, the iconv() function) to convert between ASCII and EBCDIC.

    Unlike the QShell interpreter and utilities, most PASE for i shells and utilities do not perform automatic Coded Character Set Identifier (CCSID) conversion of stream file data. However, the PASE for i utilities system and any PASE for i utility that runs a QShell command are exceptions. This is because they provide CCSID conversion support for data that the CL command or the QShell command reads from standard input or writes to standard output or standard error.

    PASE for i utilities that run QShell Java™ utilities (for example, the Java command) set the Java file.encoding property to match the PASE for i CCSID so that stream data read and written by the Java program is converted from and to the PASE for i CCSID. To force a specific file.encoding value, set the PASE for i environment variable PASE_JAVA_ENCODING before running the utility.

  • For many system resources, the IBM i operating system uses names that are not case sensitive. However, these system resources have names that are case sensitive in AIX; for example, user and group names and object names in the root file system. Some PASE for i shell and utility functions require matching case for resources that have names that are not case sensitive in IBM i, and others might return names in uppercase that are normally lowercase on AIX. For example, file name expansion in PASE for i shells is case sensitive, so you must specify uppercase to match generic names in the /QSYS.LIB file system.
    
                ls /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib/GEN*.PGM
    rather than
                ls /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib/gen*.pgm
    
  • To provide case-sensitivity and avoid name collisions with directories and files used for ILE support, most PASE for i directories and files (including shells and utilities) are stored in the /QOpenSys file system. In particular, PASE for i shells and utilities are stored in /QOpenSys/usr/bin and /QOpenSys/usr/sbin (rather than /usr/bin and /usr/sbin on AIX).

In addition to the following PASE for i commands, each PASE for i shell supports a number of built-in commands (such as cd, exec, and if). See the AIX Resources Web page for information about the built-in commands supported by each PASE for i shell and for detailed information about most of the following PASE for i commands.

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