The KORN SHELL

[Thad P Floryan]

forrie at morwyn.uucp (/dev/w1) in <1991Jan7.035239.877 at morwyn.uucp> writes:

	I am wondering about the KSH.  Someone tells me that the one
	distributed with the 2.0 fixes is 'braindamaged' ... will someone
	please tell me which verion WORKS right?  Why is it brain damaged,
	what can be done to change it, etc etc... 

	I like some of the features of the KSH, but since everyone always says
	that there are a lot of differences in compatibility with the SH, I
	have avoided it... but realistically, there's not much sense in
	avoiding it if you can fix it, or find out what's wrong...

I'm the one who claimed it's braindamaged, and it is (even the version that
accompanied the FIXDISK2).  I posted the original details years ago and
cannot quickly find them, but among the problems were incorrect evaluation
of arithmetic expressions and some others ...

The version you WANT (and which, interestingly, has the fixes that were made
to the FIXDISK2 ksh) is the one from osu-cis in the att7300/STORE directory
which is version "06/03/86".  You could use "strings" to ascertain the version
but the easiest is to be in emacs mode and type a ^V (control-V).

As far as any alleged incompatibilty with "sh", I really haven't found any,
and "ksh" is even root's default shell on ALL my systems.  The only quirk using
ksh for root is that some custom crontab entries may cause the message
"Nonstandard shell" to appear in the cronlog and abort; the "fix" to this is
to have entries in crontab like (which, by the way, IS my /usr/lib/crontab):

#sccs	"@(#)fndcmd:crontab	1.7"
#
#Mn  Hr Da Mo Da (0=SUN, 1=MON, 2=TUE, 3=WED, 4=THU, 5=FRI, 6=SAT)
#of  of of of of
#Hr  Da Mo Yr Wk  Command
#
16,46 *  *  *  *  /bin/su uucpadm -c "/usr/lib/uucp/uudemon.poll    >/dev/null"
18,48 *  *  *  *  /bin/su uucpadm -c "/usr/lib/uucp/uudemon.hour    >/dev/null"
00    4  *  *  *  /bin/su uucpadm -c "/usr/lib/uucp/uudemon.admin   >/dev/null"
59   23  *  *  *  /bin/sh         -c "/usr/local/bin/hdwarn.day     >/dev/null"
59   23  *  *  *  /bin/sh         -c "/usr/local/bin/du-logs.day    >/dev/null"
03    3  *  *  0  /bin/sh         -c "/etc/clockupd.wk              >/dev/null"
30    5  *  *  1  /bin/su uucpadm -c "/usr/lib/uucp/uudemon.cleanu  >/dev/null"
30    5  *  *  1  /bin/sh         -c "/etc/cleanup.wk               >/dev/null"


Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com ]