[HL 19980219... updated 20010803...
Sun should start bundling ksh93, now that the license has opened up.
Ksh93 is a good environment for sysadmin scripts and for prototyping.
In addition, performance of ksh93 is much improved over ksh88 (current /bin/ksh)
and the bourne shell (/bin/sh), while maintaining compatibility.
We do already ship bash, and perl. Ksh 93 should be there as well.
Attachment:
PROMO List of features in ksh93, taken from the original distr.
...HL]
Note that there are two related issues:
1. shipping ksh93 in Solaris
2. making /usr/bin/ksh be ksh93
These do not have to be done at the same time, and in fact, the
current plan is to do 1. before tackling 2. (assuming 2. is even
feasible).
Looking at the CRs that were closed as dups of this one, and looking
at the discussion in the Comments (much of which deals with
compatibility issues), I suggest that we treat this CR as dealing with
issue 2. Issue 1 can be dealt with via CR 6437624.
Work Around
[HL
use /usr/dt/bin/dtksh
- this requires the presence of the X/CDE libraries
- has a much larger memory footprint
20010803:
- part of CDE, which is being phased out.
- not being maintained by any independent party.
xxxxx@xxxxx.com 2001-09-05
Not all servers have CDE installed.
I'm told that dtksh is buggy and doesn't reflect current ksh93.
That would need to be fixed before dtksh could be a proper workaround.
Comments
It's about time we upgrade /bin/ksh.
Ksh93 provides additional functionality, a.o.:
- floating point support
- associative arrays
- nested variables, allowing the equivalent of structs
- sleep < 1s.
- more powerful pattern matching
- improved performance over /bin/sh and ksh88
- compatibility with other versions of unix/linux
that will ship ksh93.