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UNIX Command Reference for DBAs

A 68,000-line command reference for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Linux, converted from a plain text file into navigable Markdown. Download link at the bottom.

What it is

Albert van der Sel compiled UNIX command examples over years of DBA work — commands for Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server administrators who have to keep the box underneath the database alive. Version 115 is dated 2009. I have been carrying the text file around since, adding to it.

The problem with the original is not the content. It is that 2.8 MB of plain text with no structure is only usable through Ctrl+F, and only if you already know the exact string you are looking for.

So I converted it. Headings are real headings now, command listings are fenced code blocks, and there is a table of contents with 207 entries at the top. You can scroll it, link into it, and read it on a phone.

What is in it

Memory, swap and CPU inspection on five platforms, side by side. Mount and NFS. Permissions, sticky bit, SETUID. find, crontab, job control. Backup with tar, cpio, dd, compress, gzip. Filesystems and volume management. Network troubleshooting. Error code references for IBM LPARs and partition firmware. Solaris error messages. Shell scripting patterns.

It is the kind of document that answers "how do I check physical memory on HP-UX again" in four seconds instead of four minutes.

What it is not

It is not maintained and it is not modern. The core of it predates systemd, predates most of what you run in a container, and some of the AIX and Tru64 material describes machines you will never touch.

That does not make it useless. Legacy UNIX is exactly the place where you cannot guess the syntax and cannot find a decent answer online, because nobody has blogged about lsattr -E -l sys0 in fifteen years. The value of an old reference is highest precisely where the systems are old.

Treat every command as something to verify on your own box before you run it in production. Especially the ones that write.

Download

unix-command-reference.md — 2.7 MB, Markdown, UTF-8.

Your browser will probably open it as plain text rather than download it. Right-click the link and save it instead, or grab it from the terminal:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Patriarcha/notes/main/unix-command-reference.md

Content is unchanged from the original — I fixed the character encoding and added structure, nothing else. It is too large for GitHub to render in the browser, so read it in your own editor.

Credit where it belongs: this is Albert van der Sel's work. I converted the format.

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