I, for one, tried ksh and don't like it

geoff at callan.UUCP geoff at callan.UUCP
Fri Jun 1 11:47:55 AEST 1984


All this "ksh is the greatest thing since sliced beer" stuff prompts me to
stick in a contrary opinion.  I have had an opportunity to try out ksh.
(An illegally-made outside-Bell copy, I might add, but I wasn't the one who
took it, ported it, or installed it, and it's not on MY machine that I tried
it, so please no anti-piracy flames.  I do not support the theft, even though
I did take advantage of it long enough to try ksh across a modem.)

Anyway, ksh is wonderful IF you don't mind waiting up to 60 seconds for your
character echoes.  Ksh is bigger than either than csh or sh, and thus tends
to swap out more often (and takes longer to swap).  If you run in "vi" mode,
you will quickly find out that it's not a lot more convenient than the csh
history mechanism.  If you run in "emacs" mode, it sets your terminal raw and
handles character echo itself;  this means in practice that on a moderately
loaded system echoes can be delayed for quite a while.  I haven't seen such
annoyingly poor response time since I tried a timesharing system that had been
cobbled on top of a batch system, almost 15 years ago.

Furthermore, ksh is an incredible example of what happens when you try to
design a perfectly-compatible upgrade of an existing program (sh) that has
run into natural limits.  For my money, ksh is a kludge, and a slow one at
that!

	Geoff Kuenning
	Callan Data Systems
	...!ihnp4!wlbr!callan!geoff



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