Shell Programming and Scripting

What do people think about using [[ ]] in ksh and the posix stuff???? What I like in ksh is that I can do floating point calculations easily.

Sure your not using ksh93? Cause both ksh and pdksh don't support floating point

which ksh is giving /usr/bin/ksh

I know the old ksh dopes not do computations, however ksh93 does. I'm using Fedora 8, which says it does not have ksh. Got no clue!!!!

A lot of OSes have replaced the default ksh with ksh93.
Run:

Code:

/usr/bin/ksh -c 'echo ${.sh.version}'

if you get an output with version information, its ksh93.

I would go with [[ ]] and (( )). I usually don't care about the POSIX compatibility. In my opinion, unless you are creating a commercially distributable product, you should be fine.

Getting Version M 1993-12-28 s+

That is ksh93

Agreed, it's a matter of thinking where is this script likley to run?

If you're writing an install script (or the like) that could be run on a number of different OS's then POSIX is the only way to go. Buy for a script that you run on your own servers it's not such a big deal. Worst case here is if you upgrade to a new server that dosn't support ksh93, someone (you might have left by that stage) will either have to update your scripts or get ksh93 installed on the new box.

But, you can bet they will be saying "The previous guy wrote all these damn scripts that do heaps of floating poing stuff with ksh93 and now we have to re-write them to use bc!", lol.