Korn shell (original) (raw)

The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories). It is compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history. For interactive use it provides the ability to edit the command line in a WYSIWYG fashion patterned after the [vi](../../v/vi/vi.html "Vi") and [emacs](../../e/em/emacs.html "Emacs") editors. It also includes built-in arithmetic evaluation and advanced scripting functions similar to those used in more powerful programming languages such as [awk](../../a/aw/awk%5Fprogramming%5Flanguage.html "AWK programming language"), [sed](../../s/se/sed.html "Sed"), and [perl](../../p/pe/perl.html "Perl").

ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee").

SKsh is an AmigaDOS-specific version and pdksh is a free Unix version.

External Links

• Korn shell home page
• Public Domain Korn shell (pdksh).