Stranger in HP-UX
For the last couple of days I’ve been heavily playing with HP-UX, one of the unknown and never seen operating system. That’s true – I’ve never touch it before. But these days are over and now I’m overfilled with new experience and… mixed fillings. You see, on the one hand it’s UNIX and most of the tools and the concepts have many parts in common with other UNIX based OS. But… On the flip side, there are a lot of stuff that work differently. I’m not talking about things that are HP-UX specific i.e. pseudo-swap, LVM or persistent DSF, etc. but widely used and adopted by the others. For example, ifconfig. You can’t use it to view your networking devices. Or another one – -h option for ls or df commands. No luck. Not mentioning the fact that features that come for free in, lets say Solaris, Linux or *BSD, would require a special license, e.g. mirror/UX if you’re looking for mirroring the disks. Even kmeminfo, ::memstat analog from Solaris mdb, is not publicly available. On no account I’m trying to pin a label but to show that HP-UX is a bit different from other UNIXs, at least myself, have gotten used to.
Anyway, with this post I’m going to create a new category devoted to HP-UX cherishing hopes that one day someone could learn through my pain. I must admit that at times its quite amusing to plunge into something new, because usually it also comes together with mix of pure anger and course wording, especially when something well-known, as I mentioned before, doesn’t work as expected and a childish joy when you’ve finally understood the logic and the idea behind it. And that brings enormous fun into a life. So lets it keep prevailing!