Shell Programming and Scripting

I was reluctently content with the fact that I am stuck using ksh88 until, perderabo, I believe, posted in another thread that Solaris provides ksh93 in the form of dtksh (/usr/dt/bin/dtksh). I read the man page for dtksh and it shows scads of X related information.

I have run some test scripts using dtksh without anything major blowing up and the version does in fact show "Version M-12/28/93d". It seems reasonable to assume that this is indeed a true ksh93 shell but, with the X extensions, I would like to know if this is a specialized branch and if it's generally not recommended for everyday shell scripts.

Any thoughts?

Thomas

Yep, looks like it's a graphical shell. You can get ksh93 (ast-ksh) here:

http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/

jolok, thanks for the reply.

Could you be more specific? What does "it's a graphical shell" mean exactly? Does it have a bigger memory foot print (I would assume so)? Am I going to realize seriously poor performance because it is a graphical shell? As I said, I ran some tests and I am not using xterm and text is being dumped to my tty. So, essentially, I would like to know if I would be adversly affected by using it.

Not a chance, especially since my scripts are ksh88 compatible. At a minimum, I would like to use associate arrays in a couple instances.

Thomas

Well I'm lost. You already have ksh88...you want something else....but not ksh93. However, you're considering dtksh which is ksh93 plus graphical extensions. But you're worried that the graphical extensions may cause you trouble.

Thomas, you're a hard dude to please...

That is too funny, I'm not hard to please, just poor at communicating (so says my wife and now you).

I can use ksh88 but I would like to use ksh93. I don't care about about graphical extensions in dtksh and I won't be able to get ksh93 installed. I only want to know if using dtksh to gain ksh93 functionality would be a bad thing. How's that?

Thanks for making my laugh, that was a great way to end the day.

Thomas

My opinion: It's part of CDE, so unless CDE is installed, no dtksh will be available. I like my scripts to be portable so I will not make my scripts dependent on CDE. I would not want to explain to someone that they must install CDE to run my non-graphical shell script.

You can get ksh93 (ast-ksh) at the link I supplied earlier. That's what you asked for