UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello:

I'm a newbie to Unix/Linus and shell scripting.

This is probably a stupid question but here goes.

Some people at work use Korn for scripting while others use Bash. What is the difference between the two? If the two is better to use?

When a person logs in, one will type bash at the prompt and another would type ksh. I noticed that the behavior of the command line is different between the two.

I would like to learn one of these but I'm not sure which is the best one to learn.

Can someone give me some insight into all of this?

Thanks.

i like ksh. bash has the csh history mechanism but the scripting language looks like ksh.

since the command overlap for each is about 97%, you can't go wrong either way, methinks.

Any suggestions on good books for beginners?

One plus for BASH is it has the advanced bash scripting guide, regularly updated and full of intros and examples and cheat sheets.

Recent versions of bash have some really useful extra features, like full-blown regular expressions. But ksh has some things bash doesn't, like floating-point numbers.

I tend to find bash preinstalled a lot more often than I see ksh preinstalled.

I kindly suggest you purchase this written book by our popular forum member, cfajohnson:

Shell Scripting Recipes - Links

If you have any questions about the book, I am sure Chris does not mind if you ask them here

Thank you for the book recommendation. Does his book cover Bash, Korn or something different? I read the intro and it mentions POSIX shell. What is that?

Not an actual shell, it's a set of features a shell has to implement to be considered POSIX-compliant, mostly from the ancient Bourne shell. I believe BASH and KSH are both posix compliant, but they add a lot more features as well.