FACTOID # 23: In Australia, there's plenty of open road. Which is just as well, because you wouldn't want to park your car.
 
 Home   Encyclopedia   Statistics   Countries A-Z   Flags   Maps   Education   Forum   FAQ   About 
 
WHAT'S NEW
RECENT ARTICLES
More Recent Articles »
 

SEARCH ALL

FACTS & STATISTICS    Advanced view

Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 

 

(* = Graphable)

 

 


Encyclopedia > Korn Shell

The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories) in the early 1980s. It is wholly upwards compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history, which was inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users. Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ... David Korn is a computer programmer, who is probably best known for creating the Korn shell, a command line shell interface/programming language for UNIX-like systems. ... Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) was the main research and development arm of the United States Bell System. ... The 1980s refers to the years from 1980 to 1989. ... The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7, and replaced the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name, sh. ... The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system. ... Command history is a common feature in command line interface, such as in operating system shells, computer algebra programs and other software that interact with the user through a command line. ...


The main advantage of ksh over the traditional Unix shell is in its use as a programming language. Since its conception, several features were gradually added, while maintaining strong backwards compatibility with the Bourne shell. The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7, and replaced the Thompson shell, whose executable file had the same name, sh. ...


The ksh93 version supports associative arrays and built-in floating point arithmetic. An associative array (also map, hash, dictionary, finite map, lookup table, and in query-processing an index or index file) is an abstract data type composed of a collection of keys and a collection of values, where each key is associated with one value. ... A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. ...


For interactive use, ksh provides the ability to edit the command line in a WYSIWYG fashion, by hitting the appropriate cursor-up or previous-line key-sequence to recall a previous command, and then edit the command as if the users were in edit line mode. Three modes are available, compatible with vi, emacs and gmacs (ksh93s will add a 4th vim mode). WYSIWYG (IPA Pronunciation [] or []), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ... vi editing a temporary, empty file. ... This article is about the text editor. ... Vim, which stands for Vi IMproved, is an open source, multiplatform text editor extended from vi. ...


ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee"). POSIX or Portable Operating System Interface[1] is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system. ...


Until 2000, Korn Shell remained AT&T's proprietary software. Since then it has been open source, originally under a license peculiar to AT&T but, since the 93q release in early 2005, it has been licensed under the Common Public License. Korn Shell is available as part of the AT&T Software Technology (AST) Open Source Software Collection. As ksh was initially only available through a commercial license from AT&T, a number of free and open source alternatives were created. These include the public domain pdksh, Free Software Foundation's Bourne-Again-Shell bash, and zsh. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... The CPL (Common Public License) is a free software / open-source software license published by IBM. Its license terms have been approved by the Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation. ... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded in October 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project. ... -1... The Z shell (zsh) is a Unix shell written by Paul Falstad when he was a student at Princeton University. ...


Although the ksh93 version added many improvements (associative arrays, floating point arithmetic, a.o.), some vendors still ship their own version of the older ksh88 as /bin/ksh, sometimes with extensions (as of 2005 only Solaris and NCR UNIX (a.k.a. MP-RAS) ship ksh88, all other Unix vendors migrated to ksh93 and even Linux distributions started shipping ksh93). There are also two modified versions of ksh93 which add features for manipulating the graphical user interface: dtksh which is part of CDE and tksh which provides access to the Tk widget toolkit. 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Solaris is a computer operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. ... This article is about operating systems that use the Linux kernel. ... “GUI” redirects here. ... CDE on Unix (Solaris 8) DECwindows CDE on OpenVMS 7. ... In computing, Tk is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit, that is, a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface (GUI). ...


SKsh is an AmigaOS version, that offers several Amiga-specific features such as ARexx interoperability. AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. ... ARexx is the Amiga version of scripting language REXX by IBM. It has been not licensed from IBM, but it is a version written by Bill Hawes who ported REXX to the Amiga, with many special Amiga features. ...


MKS Inc.'s MKS Korn shell is another commercial ksh reimplementation. It is included with Microsoft's Services for Unix (SFU) and the Subsystem for UNIX-based applications (SUA) of Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate Editions. MKS Inc. ... Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a package which provides a Unix compliant environment on Microsoft Windows computers. ... Windows Vista is a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, Tablet PCs, and media centers. ...


See also

A shell is a computer program which interacts with the userland and subsequently the kernel of an operating system. ... test is a Unix command that evaluates conditional expressions. ...

External links


  Results from FactBites:
 
Korn shell - definition of Korn shell in Encyclopedia (241 words)
The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories) in the mid 1980s.
It is wholly upwards compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history, which was inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.
ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee").
  More results at FactBites »


 

COMMENTARY     


Share your thoughts, questions and commentary here
Your name
Your comments
Please enter the 5-letter protection code

Want to know more?
Search encyclopedia, statistics and forums:

 


Lesson Plans | Student Area | Student FAQ | Reviews | Press Releases |  Feeds | Contact
The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL.
Images may be subject to relevant owners' copyright.
All other elements are (c) copyright NationMaster.com 2003-5. All Rights Reserved.
Usage implies agreement with terms.