The MirBSD Korn Shell (mksh) is an actively developed successor of pdksh (the Public Domain Korn Shell), aimed at producing a shell good for interactive use, but with the primary focus on scripting. It is intended to be portable to most *nix-like operating systems as long as they're not too obscure. mksh incorporates improvements from OpenBSD and Debian, as well as bugfixes and enhancements developed for the MirOS, FreeWRT, and MidnightBSD projects. The emacs command line editing mode is UTF-8 capable, and Byte Order Marks are ignored in scripts. The shell supports large files, as well as all pdksh and some csh, AT&T ksh, and GNU bash features, is compatible with the Bourne shell and POSIX (within limits), has no limit on array sizes, and incorporates some other useful builtins and features. While being already fast and small (without losing functionality), flags to make it even smaller can be given at compile time. An interactive shell reads "~/.mkshrc" on startup.
License: DFSG approved
Changes:
This release features portability fixes, as mksh now runs properly on DEC/Compaq/HP OSF/1 V4.0F and V5.1 (Tru64), BSDi BSD/OS 3.1, and SGI IRIX 6.5, with gcc and the respective system compilers. The manual page looks much better in GNU groff (-Tascii is now equivalent to AT&T nroff, -Tutf8 is able to copy and paste, and -Tps is typographically nicer). Scripts can now be dæmonised. The conf/build infrastructure has been improved and made more portable.
More...
03-28-2008
