Re: "No Shell"

From: Kevin Collins (spamtotrash_at_toomuchfiction.com)
Date: 05/20/04 

Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 17:11:19 GMT

In article <c8gm54$o8m$1@grandcanyon.binc.net>, David Douthitt wrote:
> Kevin Collins wrote:
>
>> Out of curiousity, why do you prefer ksh over bash as a user shell? I
>> personally use ksh as a user shell, but use /bin/bash for root.
>
> Several reasons:
>
> * Standard: There are no extensions to trip over when I take a Linux ksh
> script into a HP-UX or Unixware environment... ksh is standard.

While I generally agree with that, there are differences and incompatibilities
between pure ksh88 and pdksh. The folks who post to this group who are
"portability oriented" would probably disagree more strongly.

> * Clean vi-editing support - everytime I enable vi command history
> editing, I find out immediately if I'm in bash or not. Bash gives nasty
> prompts and in general acts funny.
>
> * Minimalist: pdksh (or ash, by the way) support nearly everything from
> ksh and are much smaller than bash.
>
> * Familiarization: this is personal, and somewhat professional, but I
> was programming in ksh (and using csh) before bash came along. I
> finally switched to ksh when I started work here as ksh was the standard
> shell already and I wanted to learn it (I could have used csh).

Thanks, all valid reasons and ones I mostly share :)

Kevin

Relevant Pages

  • Re: vi horizontal split screen
    ... I'm an old ksh hacker, but bash will do fine. ... I started on the SysV R2 Bourne shell, and used csh for a better ... Several ksh improvements were designed to make it faster and more efficient at processing scripts, and one way to do that was substitute built-ins for external commands called from the script. ...
    (comp.editors)
  • FAST, but full feature ksh.
    ... built ksh vs a statically built bash, I found that the ksh was ... sluggish bash to the POSSIBLY quicker ksh... ... case of molasses, try playing with shell scripting on cygwin, ... but today my measurement now isn't done ...
    (comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc)
  • Re: FAST, but full feature ksh.
    ... > built ksh vs a statically built bash, I found that the ksh was about ... > sluggish bash to the POSSIBLY quicker ksh... ... > molasses, try playing with shell scripting on cygwin, but I don't ...
    (comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc)
  • Re: Set -o Vi Causes core dump and segmentation fault
    ... set -o vi command and nothing happened. ... different from the parent shell's editor it causes this segmentation ... Our parent shell is bash and the editor is set (by /etc/ ... If you then spawn a ksh subshell,run set -o vi, ...
    (linux.redhat)
  • Re: Syntax question - bash vs ksh
    ... Works fine in ksh. ... Reading the man page for bash has not enlightened me. ... syntax differs from the ksh syntax to perform the same function. ... good websites with shell comparisons and good examples, ...
    (comp.unix.shell)