ksh bugs

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <177 at uci.UUCP>, clay at uci.UUCP (News Administrator) writes:
> 
> Has anybody used the Korn shell for "unsharing"?  I tried it with the
> Microport Korn shell, expecting a speed increase, but found just the opposite.
> It did work, but was MUCH slower.

As I understand it, the capabilities of the korn shell that make it run
some shell commands (and command files) faster is that it has more built-ins
than the standard shell.  For example the korn shell has a built-in for
the echo command, built-in math operators and other such stuff.

However the cost of these additional built-ins (along with the command 
history, command line editing, etc...) is that the ksh is a much 
larger executable which takes longer to load.  This is probably why
it is slower for processing a shar.  

Another reason may be that you use the "ENV" mechanism of causing sub-shells
to read and process the .profile equivalent named in the ENV environment
variable.

Since shar's are set to work on most standard bourne shells I just use
"sh sharfile" whenever I am un-sharring a file.