Re:Pure sh bible – Posix sh alternatives to external processes
by chasil on Monday October 19, 2020 @05:03PM
(#24831000)
David Korn explains what happened here:
c) 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 straightened out?
"c) Since ksh88 is not fully POSIX compliant, some system vendors have modified ksh88 to make it compliant and used that for their POSIX shell. One way to clean up this mess is to get all the vendors to move to ksh93. ksh93 has a single source that compiles on all systems from pc,'s mac's, unix systems, and mainframes. I have no say over what vendors do, but users on these systems certainly can state their preferences."
...
# ls -la `which ksh`
-r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 186356 Jul 16 1997 /usr/bin/ksh
A lot of effort was made to keep ksh88 small. In fact the size you report on Solaris is without stripping the symbol table. The size that I am getting for ksh88i on Solaris is 160K and the size on NetBSD on intel is 135K.
ksh88 was able to compile on machines that only allowed 64K text. There were many compromises to this approach.
c) 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 straightened out?
"c) Since ksh88 is not fully POSIX compliant, some system vendors have modified ksh88 to make it compliant and used that for their POSIX shell. One way to clean up this mess is to get all the vendors to move to ksh93. ksh93 has a single source that compiles on all systems from pc,'s mac's, unix systems, and mainframes. I have no say over what vendors do, but users on these systems certainly can state their preferences."
...
A lot of effort was made to keep ksh88 small. In fact the size you report on Solaris is without stripping the symbol table. The size that I am getting for ksh88i on Solaris is 160K and the size on NetBSD on intel is 135K.ksh88 was able to compile on machines that only allowed 64K text. There were many compromises to this approach.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/02/06/2030205/david-korn-...