ksh

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The Korn shell, or ksh(1), is an extended version of the bourne shell (see sh). The NetBSD version of ksh is actually pdksh, the public domain korn shell [1]. This shell is also described in the POSIX specification and thus one can assume it is available on any POSIX-compatible system and behaves the same on each.

The extensions it adds to the bourne shell include:

  • More advanced "globbing" (aka wildcard expansion)
  • Better history browsing and command line editing (vi mode and emacs modes are available)

One point of criticism is that it has only one startup "rc" file: the .profile file. It also supports reading a startup file dependent on the value of the ENV environment variable. The disadvantage of this is that there is no (easy) way to provide ksh-specific startup files (optionally with syntax that other shells don't understand) and no way to load different initialization files depending on the mode of operation (interactive/login/noninteractive).

See also

  • sh, the bourne shell
  • csh, the C shell

References

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