AT&T's Korn Shell Source Code Released

Henk Langeveld writes, "This announcement can be found at kornshell.com: March 1, 2000: I am happy to annouce the the 'i' point release of ksh93 is now available for download. For the first time, source is available as well as binaries for several architectures. If you build binaries for new architectures, and send them to us, we can add them to the download site. The download page has been completely revised in a manner that hopefully will be easier to use. ksh93 is part of the ast-open package. tksh (ksh with tk support) is also part of this package. -- David Korn
As a long-term fan I'm glad to see the korn shell now being released under a new license. The license is quite non-standard, and does include some restrictions (changes can only be distributed as patches), but as far as I can see it does allow anyone to bundle binaries with their products. The distribution format is quite non-standard. The research group at AT&T has their own packaging system, built around nmake. "

Comments

Re:Ahhh... the Korn Shell... but is it too late?

[costas]

I am kinda dissappointed noone in this thread has mentioned Zsh.

Z-Shell is competitive with bash, and IIRC the comp.os.unix.shell FAQ shell comparison it actually has more features than any other shell out there. The new (still unstable version) even has dynamic module loading...

Plus, it's a (near) drop-in replacement for ksh and can even emulate some csh features for those that like them (search for the cshjunkie* options in the manual :-)


engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Re:In other news

[Greg Koenig]

What's really funny is that I've been to USENIX conferences with Dave and he's worn "Korn" T-shirts. I about died the first time I saw him doing this.

Actually, even more funny was when I was at the USENIX Windows NT symposium a few years ago. The Microsofties were up on stage talking about their Unix toolkit for Windows NT. This includes several common Unix commands (ls, cp, ps, etc.) along with a version of ksh. Dave stood up and went to the microphone and mentioned a few areas of incompatibility with the version of ksh used in the Unix toolkit for Windows NT. The Microsofties, not realizing who they were talking to, kept going back and forth with him, insisting that their version of ksh actually did comply with the AT&T ksh, and sort of implying that Dave (who they still didn't recognize) didn't know what he was talking about. Nearly everybody in the audience was laughing out loud, and eventually somebody let the Microsofties in on who exactly they were talking to.

Bourne Again Korn Shell?

[gjt]

I use bash as my interactive shell.

But for scripting, I always use ksh (on Solaris). Why? The ksh syntax is a superset of the original Bourne Shell, and therefore pretty much a superset of the Bourne Again Shell.

bash primarily adds readline support which makes it super-easy to use interactively. readline doesn't do much for non-interactive scripts.

In the Korn shell, the typeset comand provides a number of extra features for things such as presenting non-decimal numbers, and converting from upper case text to lower case and vice versa.

Another way cool feature of ksh is `|&` which is a way of getting a pipe to a background process. I guess they call it co-processes, but it really make a client/server process. I guess you can also call it a bi-directional pipe. You can then use `read` and `print` to send and receive stuff from the "server" started with `|&`. For example, if I need to do floating point math, I can start `bc` in the background with `|&`.

I think what we need is a ksh with readline support added. Bourne Again Korn Shell! (Maybe spell "Bourne" as "Born)

Open Source license

[Bruce Perens]

We reviewed this on the license-discuss mailing list a long time ago. Everybody in the discussion at that time concluded that it was an Open Source license, although I don't think anyone was as happy with it as they would be with some of our simpler and less restrictive licenses. I doubt that OSI will certify it but that's up to them. They tend to reject most termination clauses.

I discussed the ksh source release with David Korn a while back, including the point that it was probably too late. He seemed to think that the original still had some features not available in pdksh or elsewhere.

Thanks

Bruce

But not DFSG free?

[Carl]

Debian legal doesn't seem to consider this license DFSG free. See the thread starting at http://www.debia n.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-0003/msg00009.ht ml. Not all messages are archived yet but the main points are:

• a "you must monitor our web site" clause
• a "you are responsible for ensuring that people you distribute the software to comply with this license" clause
• a "you must contact us if you distribute patches" clause
• an unilateral-termination clause
• a "you must adhere to U.S. law" clause

The 'ensure that others comply' and the 'Termination clause' seem very non-free, the others are only very annoying (especialy if you don't have easy internet access and live outside the US).

In other news

[Greyfox]

AT&T shares fell in early trading after the popular band "Korn" announced a lawsuit for trademark infringement. "It's obvious they're using our name. Who would have thought of spelling corn with a "K" except us?" commented a lawyer for the band. AT&T declined to comment on the suit.