Quote:
Originally Posted by
jlliagre
I know I'm replying to a 10 years old post but nevertheless, this was and is still incorrect.
This is all very true. and many thanks for providing the link to the ksh repository.
Even more so, if someone wants a "non-proprietary" OS, UNIX (and rather less the POSIX-standard itself, if we could count that as a "blueprint-OS") is non-proprietary at all. Linux is - at least in a sense - non-proprietary, but it is NOT UNIX. This is not to say it is better or worse than any UNIX - just different. It is about as much "UNIX" as Plan9 or HURD (the GNU-OS) is: in many respects very similar because the lessons of UNIX were rather well learned and in some respects totally different (and not always for the better).
So, the notion that in a completely proprietary OS the shell should be non-proprietary is an artificial demand.
For me the main reason to use the ksh - ksh88, mind you, because it is the default shell in AIX - is that it is IMHO better suited to large-scale shell programming than bash is. I make extensive use of the FPATH feature which lets me put a library of script functions somewhere. bash doesn't have that and even though i have tried hard to come up with a similar functionality i haven't found a way to do it up to now.
bakunin