ksh availability

[Bill Stewart]

Doug Gwyn asked:
> Question:  Is ksh completely compatible with the SVR2 Bourne shell?
> I seem to recall hearing that function definition was different..

No, the Sys V R2 Bourne-shell-upgrade is not compatible with ksh.
Lots of things are different, and the ksh stuff is mostly better.
I don't have ksh source on this machine, but Korn wrote a preliminary analysis
of the differences that comes with the source.  Most of the difference are
either syntax (both shells doing the same thing, just a shade differently), or
features in ksh that aren't in SysVR2sh.  For me, the latter is the important
concern - the Korn shell history mechanism is nice (yes, I've used csh.)

There is a "batch"-like interface similar in capability to csh's history, but the
interesting interface is the VISUAL mode - the current line on your CRT is a
one-line screen-editor window into your history file; you can set EDITOR=vi or
EDITOR=*macs to get vi-style or emacs-style editing commands.

			Bill Stewart, ihnp4!ho95c!wcs