UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Both of these services are undoubtedly relying on libc so are very unlikely to work.
I suspect it's the other way around. This feature was likely implemented first by ksh and picked later by bash. In any case, bash is stuck with text only data so is unlikely to be usable to process binary data. On the other hand ksh93 is able to work with binary variables (typeset -b -Z size) and has a real raw read command (read -N size). However, I don't know how to convert the variable content to pure binary using only shell internal commands though as it is base64 encoded.
I'm afraid umask execution permission is ignored (filtered out) by the shells so this will be the next hurdle should a binary copy solution is found.

@jlliagre
This is verifiable fact.

The O/P states that bash is still working. I picked up the bash "read" idea from the IBM website after googling the library filename (which we finally got accurately in post #15). Found a thread where they were responding to someone in a similar situation. Renaming this library is a technique to get certain software such as Apache running on AIX when a replacement library is installed further down the library search path. However you have to do things in precisely the right order or you are in a mess.
Unfortunately the promising thread petered out when that O/P rebooted the computer and an unrelated can of worms opened due to having two system discs at different releases of AIX with the wrong one as the default boot.

I picked on "ftp" and "rcp" as ideas because they were not on a list I found of dependencies for the high level library. This does not mean that it will work, but it is worth a try. Given access to the O/S we could find out what libraries each binary requires and look for a loophole.

On the permissions front we won't need execute permissions but we could need world read. Depends on what the default umask is in the first place.

Overall this would be much easier if you or I had a running copy of this AIX complete with the unusual addition of "bash".

I'd still be interested if there is someone out there who can write a binary file copy in "bash".

As you hinted in an earlier post, I too am surprised that this computer stayed running for any length of time.

There are still many options available almost all of which involve booting an alternative system to carry out a repair. Depends on local conditions and whether they have a full release kit and a fully documented system (it's a bit too late to do a hardware and software inventory).

thnx for reading us, unfortunatly no service/deamon will get triggered by a remote connection, as they are linked to libc ...

hmm i will try that read -r -n1 ...

regards

---------- Post updated at 10:24 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:05 AM ----------

thanx for yout time too

yup the server was up for a week in that state, i personally (sorry) am not surprised, as the necessary binaries for a session (kernel, TheLogin and shells and other binaries were already on RAM ,
what happend in this case is that every NEW process/programm that we try to lunch ... wont lunch ...

Reparing the thing is not an issue at all, the challenge was to do it , the Unix way
not the crosoft way -- i just hate rebooting machines reinstalling is even more dishonoring to me

yup its a matter of a few minutes rebooting a different media, mount the root partition manually somewhere and i throw in that cp lib.a.old lib.a

now the server got fixed ... but not to flatter my self I think this is a good subject and very pedagogic, as we have seen many nifty things about unix ...and i have learned things in here

thnx to all, I will recheck this thread daily , as if someone finds a solution I will be a little bit more litterate after reading it

Have a great one

You misunderstood my reply. I was more commenting the "but not ksh" part of your sentence. Bash has indeed a character by character read feature, but as far as I know isn't "raw" in the sense it cannot read or store binary data (specifically nulls) so wouldn't be suitable for the expected task.
Can you post a link to that thread ?
Either they bundle libc (i.e. are statically linked) or they are dynamically linked and obviously need libc.a which itself demand libcrypt.a. The OP stated there was no statically linked executables on that AIX release. This lead me to conclude that way can't work (just like mounting a removable media fails).
May be. That depends on AIX implementation. On Solaris shared libraries are required to be executable, on Gnu/Linux, they aren't.
If setting the x bit is required with AIX, the umask won't help. "umask" allows to remove bits that otherwise would have been set, not the other way around. A shell do not create executable files.