[rescue] ksh q...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, September 14, 2001 at 17:26:27 (-0500), Reagen B. Ward wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] ksh q...
>
> Not to be overly pedantic (well, ok, overly pedantic), but pdksh is far 
> from being real ksh.

Well....  pdksh not really that far from being 100% ksh88 compatible,
though it doesn't yet include many of the newer ksh93 features.  There
are details of most every tiny difference included in the pdksh sources.
See the NOTES file in particular.  PDksh claims close compatability with
IEEE POSIX 1003.2; and Ksh-93i is "intended to conform".....

For general day-to-day use I find the latest pdksh to be quite stable
and sufficiently complete (I've been using it for several years now on
NetBSD as my sole user shell, and this may be significant once you learn
I have over three thousand lines of script that run every time I login!)

(I still use the /bin/sh that comes with NetBSD for system scripts, etc.)

>  I would suggest installing AT&T if installing a new
> ksh.  If David Korn says pdksh is not complete, I believe him.

I haven't yet tried the latest and now supposedly freely available ATT
Ksh, although I did download the source recently....

The code in ATT Ksh though (and I've been privy to it since about 1986)
has always scared me, and with each new release (we're up to "ksh93l+")
the list of bugs fixes has always made me very worried.  Of course many
of the bugs never bothered me when I was using the broken version, so
part of my concern is purely psychologically driven by learning of their
presence after the fact.  :-)

if you want to try it go to:

	http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/

You can get the whole mess of nifty "new" Open ATT stuff, including pax,
sort, ksh93, nmake, sfio, vmalloc, and so on with just these two source
bundles:

	http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/download/tgz/INIT.2001-07-04.0000.tgz
	http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/download/tgz/ast-open.2001-07-04.0000.tgz

It's really VERY cool that they've removed even the old license that was
on this software when it was available to owners of the "Practical
Reusable UNIX Software" book and have made it totally and truly open.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
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