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KornShell

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KornShell
Original author(s)David Korn
Initial release1983[1][2]
Stable release
ksh93v / June 1, 2013; 11 years ago (2013-06-01)[3]
Written inC
Operating systemUnix
Available inEnglish
TypeUnix shell
License
Websitewww.kornshell.org

KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983.[1][2] The initial development was based on Bourne shell source code.[6] Other early contributors were Bell Labs developers Mike Veach and Pat Sullivan, who wrote the Emacs- and vi-style line editing modes' code, respectively.[7] KornShell is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell, inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.

Design

KornShell complies with POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.) Major differences between KornShell and the traditional Bourne shell include:

History

Interaction with pdksh in OpenBSD (default shell)

Until 2000, KornShell remained AT&T′s proprietary software. Since then it has been open source software, originally under a license particular to AT&T but, since the 93q release in early 2005, it has been licensed under the Eclipse Public License.[4] KornShell is available as part of the AT&T Software Technology (AST) Open Source Software Collection. As KornShell was initially only available through a proprietary license from AT&T, a number of free and open source alternatives were created. These include pdksh, mksh, GNU bash, and zsh.

The functionality of the original KornShell, ksh88, was used as a basis for the standard POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.)

Some vendors still ship their own version of the older ksh88, sometimes with extensions. ksh93 is still maintained by its author. Releases of ksh93 are versioned by appending a letter to the name; the current version is ksh93u, following ksh93t+ (which followed ksh93t); ksh93v is in the beta phase.[9]

As "Desktop KornShell", dtksh, the ksh93 was distributed as part of the CDE.[10] This version also provide shell-level mappings for Motif widgets. It was intended as competitor to tcl/tk.[11]

The original KornShell, ksh88, is the default shell on AIX since version 4,[12][13] with ksh93 available separately.[14]

UnixWare 7 includes both ksh88 and ksh93. The default Korn shell is ksh93 supplied as /usr/bin/ksh, and the older version is available as /usr/bin/ksh88.[15] UnixWare also includes dtksh when CDE is installed.

Variants

There are several software products related to KornShell:

  • dtksh — a fork of ksh93, which is part of CDE.
  • tksh — a fork of ksh93, which provides access to the Tk widget toolkit.
  • oksh — a fork of OpenBSD′s flavour of KornShell, which supports GNU/Linux only; it is used as the default shell in DeLi Linux.
  • mksh — a free implementation of the KornShell language, forked from pdksh, from MirOS BSD licensed under permissive (though not public domain) terms; specifically, the MirOS Licence.[5] Outside BSD, this variant has replaced pdksh on Debian.[16]
  • SKsh — an AmigaOS flavour, which provides several Amiga-specific features, such as ARexx interoperability.
  • MKS Inc.′s MKS Korn shell — a proprietary implementation of the KornShell language from Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) up to version 2.0; according to David Korn, the MKS Korn shell was not fully compatible with KornShell in 1998.[17][18] in SFU version 3.0 Microsoft replaced the MKS Korn shell with a new POSIX.2-compliant shell as part of Interix.[19]
  • KornShell is included in UWIN, a Unix compatibility package by David Korn.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Ron Gomes (Jun 9, 1983). "Toronto USENIX Conference Schedule (tentative)". Newsgroupnet.usenix. Retrieved Dec 29, 2010.
  2. ^ a b Guy Harris (Oct 10, 1983). "csh question". Newsgroupnet.flame. Retrieved Dec 29, 2010.
  3. ^ http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/notes.html
  4. ^ a b http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/gen/ast-open.html
  5. ^ a b https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
  6. ^ Korn, David G. (October 26, 1994), "ksh - An Extensible High Level Language", Proceedings of the USENIX 1994 Very High Level Languages Symposium, USENIX Association, retrieved February 5, 2015, Instead of inventing a new script language, we built a form entry system by modifying the Bourne shell, adding built-in commands as necessary.
  7. ^ Bolsky, Morris I.; Korn, David G. (1989). "Acknowledgements". The KornShell Command and Programming Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. pp. xii. ISBN 0-13-516972-0.
  8. ^ http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/#variants Bourne Shell evolvement
  9. ^ http://lists.research.att.com/pipermail/ast-users/2014q2/004548.html
  10. ^ Bill Rosenblatt; Arnold Robbins (2002). Learning the Korn Shell (2 ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc. pp. viii–ix. ISBN 978-0-596-00195-7.
  11. ^ J. Stephen Pendergrast (1995). Desktop KornShell graphical programming. Addison-Wesley. p. 359. ISBN 978-0-201-63375-7.
  12. ^ Casey Cannon; Scott Trent; Carolyn Jones (1999). Simply AIX 4.3. Prentice Hall PTR. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-13-021344-0.
  13. ^ http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds5/sh.htm
  14. ^ http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/korn_shell_enhanced.htm
  15. ^ http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/DIFFS/UNIX95_Conformance.html#ksh-93_vs_ksh-88
  16. ^ https://people.debian.org/~spaillard/Debian_Release_Notes/mksh.html
  17. ^ "David Korn Tells All". Slashdot. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
  18. ^ "Jerry Feldman — USENIX NT/LISA NT conference attendee". Lists.blu.org. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
  19. ^ "Windows Services for UNIX Version 3.0". Technet.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
  20. ^ Anatole Olczak (2001). The Korn shell: Unix and Linux programming manual. Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-201-67523-8.

Further reading