ksh does indeed have a special way to deal with child scripts that have no #! leading line. This introduces a number of special features that expands the traditional unix environment. These expanded features are very non-standard. Basically ksh then also you to export arrays, functions, and aliases to the environment. My feeling is that this is too non-standard. It's well documented, but as this thread attests, few people read the ksh documention. This makes exported arrays, functions, and aliases a support issue even when they are used correctly. Even worse are folks who unintentionally export arrays, functions, and aliases and then are bewildered by the result.

My advice is to always use #! in every script every time.

ksh cannot rely on the standard Unix environment for this stuff. So it implements non-#! child scripts by simply forking. The forked child ksh process knows every variable, array, function, and aliases that the parent knew including stuff that was not exported to the child script. So the child ksh process takes a moment and deletes everything not explicitly exported to the child script. Then the child script can run apparently pulling exported arrays, functions, and aliases from the "environment".

In "ps" this child ksh process will look like a duplicate of the parent. It is. It was forked from the parent. Some Unix systems allow a process to change the arguments that appear in "ps". ksh tries to do this. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. In this case, the final 6 characters of the original arguments were not over written. I might call that a "bug". I might even report it if I actually cared about non-#! ksh scripts.