[Gllug] Shell

Ian Northeast ian at house-from-hell.demon.co.uk
Mon Mar 4 23:18:01 UTC 2002


Harry wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alain Williams" <addw at phcomp.co.uk>
> 
> >
> > AFIR about 10 years ago POSIX mandated ksh as being present on *nix boxen,
> 
> This was the reason for my question. I was unsure if all boxes had it or
> not. I went looking at all the shells after having korn on the hp box and
> wanted to use the one I was most likely to encounter in the wild.

I have never encountered a *nix on which some sort of ksh could not be
installed easily. On the Open Source ones it is usually pdksh. All the
commercial ones I have used have the genuine article. I use ksh as my
normal shell on all platforms I use (AIX, Solaris, Linux, *BSD and even
Siemens Reliant Unix; I had one running on Windows once too). It's often
not installed by default though. Hence my recommendation to stick to
bourne syntax for maximum portability.

> I asked the Unix guys about installing Vim and Bash and was told it was more
> trouble than it was worth as I would probably be the only person using them
> and they would have to do quite a lot of work to have them tested and then
> kept up to date as they do not come with a standard install from HP-UX. At
> least I think that is what they where saying.

Lazy bastards IMHO. I make both vim and bash available to my users on
AIX if they want them. I do point out that they use them at their own
risk of course, and insist that their management approve. Neither is
hard to build on AIX and if you know AIX at all you will realise that
this is a strong indication that they are not hard on any common
platform.

Regards, Ian

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