Using SMIT as a command generator instead of a menu system

Goal

Turn a SMIT/smitty menu session into the exact command line an agent can run non-interactively afterward, without guessing flag names.

Prerequisites

Access to run smit or smitty interactively at least once for the task in question; write permission in the directory where its log files will be created (normally the invoking user's home directory).

Steps

1. Run the task through smitty <fastpath> (for example smitty chuser to change a user's attributes) rather than hunting for the top-level menu; FastPaths are the names of the same dialogs SMIT's menu hierarchy leads to.
2. Fill in the dialog fields as needed. Before pressing Enter, F6 (Command) in smitty shows the command statement your choices have constructed; that line is the exact command to reuse.
3. After the session, read $HOME/smit.script: it records the target task commands SMIT actually ran, with their flags, parameters and timestamps, in a form intended to be directly reusable as a shell script.
4. For more diagnostic detail (including intermediate commands, not just the target task), read $HOME/smit.log instead; it is more verbose and intended for troubleshooting SMIT itself as much as for learning the command.
5. To capture output to specific files rather than the defaults, invoke smit -s <path> (script) and smit -l <path> (log) so multiple SMIT sessions don't append to the same files.
6. To generate the command list without actually executing anything, smit -x runs SMIT so that it does not run any command_to_execute, while still logging what would have run — useful for extracting a command from a menu path you don't want to apply yet.
7. Confirm the learned command works standalone: run it directly outside SMIT and check its result matches what the SMIT session produced.

Expected result

A smit.script (or a line copied from the output window) containing an exact, flag-complete AIX command that reproduces the menu-driven change, suitable for a script or an agent's non-interactive run.

Limits and test basis

smit.script records the target commands, not necessarily every validation SMIT performed on the input first; re-running the extracted command outside SMIT skips those checks, so verify preconditions (the same ones SMIT's dialog enforced) before reuse. SMIT does not overwrite these files between sessions — they are appended — so stale entries from earlier tasks can accumulate unless -s/-l direct each session to its own file.