Informix DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

The Tbcheck Utility

The tbcheck utility is used to inspect the actual data on the disks. This is an important utility because this data is stored as binary data broken into pages. Short of writing specialized code to decode this binary data, tbcheck is the only way of accessing the actual data and index pages on the disk. In fact, in most UNIX installations, it is the only way to even see the data. This is because most UNIX installations will use raw disk devices to hold the OnLine chunks. Since these devices are not mounted in the UNIX file system, they never appear in most UNIX outputs. Even if the system were using UNIX cooked files for data storage, the data is stored in a binary format that cannot be viewed by normal UNIX commands.

UNIX ...