Adventure in UNIX commands - ksh - (nf)

[trb at masscomp.UUCP]

Jeff Bowles (uokvax!jab) says that we shouldn't be talking about the
Korn shell here, cuz AT&T hasn't announced it for sale.

I beg to violently disagree.

The Korn shell has (arguable) major advantages over System V sh and 4.2
csh.  Nicer command line editing than csh, blindingly fast script
execution, job control, etc.  It runs sh scripts, it has reasonable sh
parsing rather than the braindamaged csh parsing prblems.  And it's
written in C! ;-)

Ksh isn't some internal BTL secret, its guts have been discussed in
several talks at USENIX.  What keeps it from being released?  Not Dave
Korn (its author), not some fascist plot on the part of the Bell
System to keep it from you.  I suspect that lack of sufficient
interest keeps this and other Bell System UNIX products from coming
outside the Bell System.  Lack of sufficient interest on the parts of
the bureaucrats who release the stuff, because of a lack of sufficient
interest on the part of us hackers.  If we want stuff released by
AT&T, we should line up outside their door.  And yes, that means we
should discuss it here.

Yes, "we have it and you don't (nyeah nyeah)" is childish.  But we
should discuss it.  Discussing a product whose guts has been described
at USENIX isn't like discussing something that's proprietary.

	Gimme ksh!
	Andy Tannenbaum   Masscomp Inc  Westford MA   (617) 692-6200 x274