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Ask David Korn About ksh And More

Posted by timothy on from the and-his-critically-acclaimed-pop-music dept.

David Korn is the author of the famous Korn shell, ksh, which deserves consideration next to the ubiquitous bash. Quote (regarding the AT&T research group he's part of): "We don't write anything in Perl anymore, because [ksh93] has all the functionality built in." He's also an AT&T fellow, and heads up the UWIN project, which "provides a mechanism for building and running UNIX applications on Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows 95 with few, if any, changes necessary." This is the software that allowed some crazy folks to run GNOME on Windows several weeks back as well. (And is available for no-cost personal use.) This is the same David Korn you may remember from this picture. I met him at a recent NYLUG meeting when he spoke about the Advanced Software Technologies collection of tools, now Open Source, and he graciously agreed to field questions in the usual Slashdot interview style. So please leave your questions in the space below --1 question per comment, please -- and Korn will get back to you with answers in the near future.

17 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. pdksh... by mirko · · Score: 3

    Do you collaborate (or plan to) with the pdksh development team ?
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    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  2. Graphical dtksh, zend, standardizing on ksh93, rpm by emil · · Score: 3
    1. Since the code to Motif is now free and open, is there any possiblity that dtksh, the ksh93-compliant CDE shell with Motif extensions will be open-sourced? Novel wrote it; will they give it away?
    2. Any possibility that you could leverage Zend from php? Or what would it take to implement a dbi-like SQL layer for ksh?
    3. Under Solaris and HP-UX, ksh88 is installed in /usr/bin/ksh, ksh93 is installed in /usr/dt/bin/dtksh, but the default shell is the "Posix" shell, a superset of ksh. Is there any hope of getting this mess straigtened out?
    4. Will I ever expect Red Hat to include an RPM for ksh93? Or would you consider merging with Bash?
  3. Why Only Unix/Linux? by north.coaster · · Score: 4

    The "shell" has been a key feature of Unix/Linux for over twenty years. The concept of having the freedom to use a different shell is clearly popular and important among users. Do you have any thoughts about why the shell concept has not caught on with other operating systems? I'm thinking of NT and Win2K in particular, but it seems to be true in general.

    north.coaster

  4. UWIN and Cygwin by Lumpish+Scholar · · Score: 3

    How would you compare the UWIN and Cygwin projects?

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  5. ksh93 as a programming language? by Lumpish+Scholar · · Score: 4

    What are some of the differences between ksh88 (which I think of as comparable to bash or the Posix shell) and ksh93, that makes the latest KornShell as good or better a language than Perl?

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  6. You mean this one? by robinjo · · Score: 4

    I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

    One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

    Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

    An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

    The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

    The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

    The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

    This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)

    Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

    ---Lisa

  7. ksh today by Y-Leen · · Score: 4
    During the design of ksh, were you limited/influenced by computer hardware and consumer market?

    Given the chance to completely redesign ksh for today's higher spec mahines and the current consumer base, what new features would you include?

  8. True Story? by travisd · · Score: 5
    Was the story about you embarrasing a Microsoftie at a conference true? Specifically, that he was insisting that their implmentation of ksh in their unix compatibility kit was true to the "real" thing and trying to argue the point with you. The argument ended when somoene else finally stood up and informed the speaker who he was arguing with.

    Just curious...

  9. Two simple questions... by w00ly_mammoth · · Score: 3

    Unix was a system invented decades ago. Most software becomes obsolete after 5 years. This has not been the case with unix. Why is it still here?

    A corollary - is unix holding up progress? If a brilliant new system were to be written that overthrew the establishment (like unix did in its day), it would need the momentum of people supporting it. Such a momentum isn't possible when the hacker community continues to support the well established unix way of thinking. Does this in some way impede the appearance of a completely new paradigm (like unix was in its day...)? What would be the conditions that could create such a new system? After all, it's unlikely that unix will be the research OS of choice for decades or centuries - it will have to give up at some point.

    w/m

  10. Kind of a shell question... by update() · · Score: 4
    There's a lot of squabbling in the Linux world about how the Unix mentality of small apps communicating through standard input/output to form a pipeline should be maintained in the new whiz-bang, GUI environments. Do you think that it can/should be done? What should be the most important considerations for such a messaging system and how should a standard be established?

    So Korn (the band) drinks Coors Light? I might have suspected...

  11. What functionality/code in ksh r u least proud of? by segmond · · Score: 4

    It is very hard to find a programmer who is completely satisified with his code. No matter how happy she is with it, there is always that part which she wishes to improve. As far as ksh is concerned what is it that you wish you didn't do, can improve?

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    ------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
  12. UWIN and etc by rabtech · · Score: 5

    You once said that you had to learn Windows NT because you couldn't criticize what you didn't know. What I'd like to know (as a primarily Windows programmer) is what do you consider to be the best and worst parts of both the Windows NT/2000 model and the UNIX model. What advice can you give? Also, has working on the UWIN project given you any insights that you can share with the rest of the community?
    -
    The IHA Forums

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  13. Public Apology by watanabe · · Score: 5
    Dear Dr. Korn, I feel I owe you an apology, and this seemed like a great chance! I went to school with Adam at Brown. And, in 1993, my roommate, Matt Smith, woke me up at about midnight, excitedly telling me "Do you know the Korn Shell? This guy's dad wrote the Korn shell!!!" He was coming in with Adam from somewhere.

    I sort of turned over in my sleep, (I was extremely groggy), and said "I hate the Korn shell." and went back to bed. Adam never really talked to me after that, although he was polite enough to me at parties.

    So, Dr. Korn, I feel I owe you an apology. I didn't mean to disrespect your lifework in front of your son! I still can't use the korn shell, but call it fear of the unknown, please, rather than lucid comments on your code.

    Peter Vessenes, Brown '97

  14. Ksh Programming For the Web by Dom2 · · Score: 3

    How do you feel that ksh holds up for web programming? I have always enjoyed programming shell scripts more than anything else, but I have always been unhappy with the shell idioms for parsing securely and correctly (the myriad of substitution operators is a nightmare to control). This is one area in which Perl has really taken the lead. How do you think shell programming could be better adapted for the web?

    Also, how do you feel about most commercial Unix vendors (and projects like pdksh) that are still shipping ksh88 as the default, 13 years later? ksh93 has many more useful features, but the takeup has been slow.

    Thanks,
    -Dom

  15. Comparison by Shadowlion · · Score: 5

    Background: the only shell I've ever really used is bash. Bash has always seemed to be the standard UNIX shell (or, at least, the standard default UNIX shell), and for the most part I've always been able to do what I wanted in it.

    Question: can you engage in a little unadulterated advocacy for a moment to offer some reasons why an informed user might consider using ksh over bash or other popular UNIX shells? What does ksh provide that other shells don't? Similarly, can you give a realistic appraisal of ksh's drawbacks as compared to bash or other shells?

    Thanks.


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  16. what about enhancing ksh syntax ? by mirko · · Score: 3
    Ksh is quite cool as it is much more compact than bash ; here are their respective sizes on a Solaris system :
    • -> /usr/local/bin/bash -version
      GNU bash, version 2.02.0(1)-release (sparc-sun-solaris2.6)
      Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

      -> ls -la /usr/local/bin/bash
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 bin bin 3157516 Jul 14 1998 /usr/local/bin/bash
    • # ksh -o emacs
      # Version M-11/16/88i

      # ls -la `which ksh`
      -r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 186356 Jul 16 1997 /usr/bin/ksh
    On a Linux system, these are approximately 300k for bash and 160k for (pd)ksh.
    In which direction do you plan to improve it ?
    Will you rather keep it compact or extend its functionalities regardless the volume increase ?
    This issue is quite important for me as, as of yet I am working upon some System-on-a-floppy distribution and the size appears to be critical in this context.
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    Trolling using another account since 2005.
  17. So, Dave ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    Quick question: Vi or Emacs?