Find Users without a password in UNIX AIX

Sudo is by far the best solution for this, and if I recall from my days working in their support department, the documentation might actually call for that when you are using the legacy unix listener.

You could probably hack around it by changing the service account it uses to root, but that is a bit ugly, and running network listeners as root is undesirable.

You'd be better off using the newer SSH connector, assuming your support contract is current and you'd be willing to upgrade.

In order to connect to the mysql server you must provide credentials. You can specify them in a configuration file, pass them via the command line, or simply create account that doesn't require credentials.

Of course the no-password option should never be used, the pass-by command line isn't great because anyone who can run ps may be able to see the command line.

The recommended option is to create a mysql configuration file with the credentials in it and then protect that file with filesystem permissions so only your backup user can access it.

You being able to login to the mysql server while logged in interactively as root seems to suggest that you either don't have a root password set, or that you have a configuration file that is not being found by your script. If you have a .my.cnf you may need to manually point to it. If your root account doesn't have a password set then I would strongly encourage you to fix that.

Update (2016-06-29) If you are running mysql 5.6.6 or greater, you should look at the mysql_config_editor tool that allows you to store credentials in an encrypted file. Thanks to Giovanni for mentioning this to me.