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Can Sonic add ATT KSH as ksh93

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2014 1:32 am
by jwilkie
I am a developer writing korn shell scripts that I wish to run on commercial UNIX machines using AIX, Solaris and/or HPUX as their OS. I logged into shell.sonic.net and checked the version of their /bin/ksh and found that it was
"PD KSH v5.2.14" or the Public Domain version of ksh. Unfortunately, for myself, psksh does not support arrays and I just happen to use a lot of arrays in my shell scripts. The UNIX boxes use ATT version of ksh while Linux uses the
pdksh version.

Is there a way for Sonic to add the ATT version of ksh? I found that ATT has released its korn shell into the public domain and either the source or binary can be freely downloaded onto Linux machines. The URL is http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/download/ and I believe that the ksh is the 1993 version. It would be nice if Sonic did download the binary and installed it as /bin/ksh93. I don't think it would be confusing to have two versions of ksh, and definitely, with ksh93, you would have an upgraded version of "ksh".

Re: Can Sonic add ATT KSH as ksh93

Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014 2:26 pm
by joemuller
Maybe you've already tried, but can that version of ksh be compiled to your home directory? I've had some success in the past building local versions of tools and libraries, at least if they don't require newer versions of gcc:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1030&p=7949&hilit=pil#p7949

If you're running bash or ksh, there should be a way to automatically launch another shell on login - not the most elegant solution, but it works.