Bash or KornShell ksh

Question

I am not new to  nix  however lately I have been spending a lot of time at the prompt  My question is what are the advantages of using KornShell  ksh  or Bash Shell  Where are the pitfalls of using one over the other    Looking to understand from the perspective of a user  rather than purely scripting

User · Answer

For one thing  bash has tab completion  This alone is enough to make me prefer it over ksh   Z shell has a good combination of ksh s unique features with the nice things that bash provides  plus a lot more stuff on top of that

User · Answer

The difference between Kornshell and Bash are minimal  There are certain advantages one has over the other  but the differences are tiny    BASH is much easier to set a prompt that displays the current directory  To do the same in Kornshell is hackish  Kornshell has associative arrays and BASH doesn t  Now  the last time I used Associative arrays was    Let me think    Never  Kornshell handles loop syntax a bit better  You can usually set a value in a Kornshell loop and have it available after the loop  Bash handles getting exit codes from pipes in a cleaner way  Kornshell has the print command which is way better than the echo command  Bash has tab completions  In older versions Kornshell has the r history command that allows me to quickly rerun older commands  Kornshell has the syntax cd old new which replaces old with new in your directory and CDs over there  It s convenient when you have are in a directory called  foo bar barfoo one bar bar foo bar and you need to cd to  foo bar barfoo two bar bar foo bar In Kornshell  you can simply do cd one two and be done with it  In BASH  you d have to cd                two bar bar foo bar    I m an old Kornshell guy because I learned Unix in the 1990s  and that was the shell of choice back then  I can use Bash  but I get frustrated by it at times because in habit I use some minor feature that Kornshell has that BASH doesn t and it doesn t work  So  whenever possible  I set Kornshell as my default   However  I am going to tell you to learn BASH  Bash is now implemented on most Unix systems as well as on Linux  and there are simply more resources available for learning BASH and getting help than Kornshell  If you need to do something exotic in BASH  you can go on Stackoverflow  post your question  and you ll get a dozen answers in a few minutes -- and some of them will even be correct    If you have a Kornshell question and post it on Stackoverflow  you ll have to wait for some old past their prime hacker like me wake up from his nap before you get an answer  And  forget getting any response if they re serving pudding up in the old age home that day   BASH is simply the shell of choice now  so if you ve got to learn something  might as well go with what is popular

User · Answer

This is a bit of a Unix vs Linux battle  Most if not all Linux distributions have bash installed and ksh optional  Most Unix systems  like Solaris  AIX and HPUX have ksh as default   Personally I always use ksh  I love the vi completion and I pretty much use Solaris for everything

User · Answer

This is a bit of a Unix vs Linux battle  Most if not all Linux distributions have bash installed and ksh optional  Most Unix systems  like Solaris  AIX and HPUX have ksh as default   Personally I always use ksh  I love the vi completion and I pretty much use Solaris for everything

User · Answer

Bash    The various UNIX and Linux implementations have various different source level implementations of ksh  some of which are real ksh  some of which are pdksh implementations and some of which are just symlinks to some other shell that has a  ksh  personality  This can lead to weird differences in execution behavior   At least with bash you can be sure that it s a single code base  and all you need worry about is what  usually minimum  version of bash is installed  Having done a lot of scripting on pretty much every modern  and not-so-modern  UNIX  programming to bash is more reliably consistent in my experience

User · Answer

My answer would be  pick one and learn how to use it   They re both decent shells  bash probably has more bells and whistles  but they both have the basic features you ll want  bash is more universally available these days  If you re using Linux all the time  just stick with it   If you re programming  trying to stick to plain  sh  for portability is good practice  but then with bash available so widely these days that bit of advice is probably a bit old-fashioned   Learn how to use completion and your shell history  read the manpage occasionally and try to learn a few new things

User · Answer

The difference between Kornshell and Bash are minimal  There are certain advantages one has over the other  but the differences are tiny    BASH is much easier to set a prompt that displays the current directory  To do the same in Kornshell is hackish  Kornshell has associative arrays and BASH doesn t  Now  the last time I used Associative arrays was    Let me think    Never  Kornshell handles loop syntax a bit better  You can usually set a value in a Kornshell loop and have it available after the loop  Bash handles getting exit codes from pipes in a cleaner way  Kornshell has the print command which is way better than the echo command  Bash has tab completions  In older versions Kornshell has the r history command that allows me to quickly rerun older commands  Kornshell has the syntax cd old new which replaces old with new in your directory and CDs over there  It s convenient when you have are in a directory called  foo bar barfoo one bar bar foo bar and you need to cd to  foo bar barfoo two bar bar foo bar In Kornshell  you can simply do cd one two and be done with it  In BASH  you d have to cd                two bar bar foo bar    I m an old Kornshell guy because I learned Unix in the 1990s  and that was the shell of choice back then  I can use Bash  but I get frustrated by it at times because in habit I use some minor feature that Kornshell has that BASH doesn t and it doesn t work  So  whenever possible  I set Kornshell as my default   However  I am going to tell you to learn BASH  Bash is now implemented on most Unix systems as well as on Linux  and there are simply more resources available for learning BASH and getting help than Kornshell  If you need to do something exotic in BASH  you can go on Stackoverflow  post your question  and you ll get a dozen answers in a few minutes -- and some of them will even be correct    If you have a Kornshell question and post it on Stackoverflow  you ll have to wait for some old past their prime hacker like me wake up from his nap before you get an answer  And  forget getting any response if they re serving pudding up in the old age home that day   BASH is simply the shell of choice now  so if you ve got to learn something  might as well go with what is popular

User · Answer

This is a bit of a Unix vs Linux battle  Most if not all Linux distributions have bash installed and ksh optional  Most Unix systems  like Solaris  AIX and HPUX have ksh as default   Personally I always use ksh  I love the vi completion and I pretty much use Solaris for everything

User · Answer

foxxtrot  Actually  the standard shell is Bourne shell  sh    bin sh on Linux is actually bash  but if you re aiming for cross-platform scripts  you re better off sticking to features of the original Bourne shell or writing it in something like perl

User · Answer

I m a korn-shell veteran  so know that I speak from that perspective   However  I have been comfortable with Bourne shell  ksh88  and ksh93  and for the most I know which features are supported in which   I should skip ksh88 here  as it s not widely distributed anymore    For interactive use  take whatever fits your need  Experiment  I like being able to use the same shell for interactive use and for programming   I went from ksh88 on SVR2 to tcsh  to ksh88sun  which added significant internationalisation support  and ksh93  I tried bash  and hated it because it flattened my history  Then I discovered shopt -s lithist and all was well   The lithist option assures that newlines are preserved in your command history    For shell programming  I d seriously recommend ksh93 if you want a consistent programming language  good POSIX conformance  and good performance  as many common unix commands can be available as builtin functions     If you want portability use at least both  And make sure you have a good test suite   There are many subtle differences between shells   Consider for example reading from a pipe   b 42  amp  amp  echo one two three four       read a b junk  amp  amp  echo  b   This will produce different results in different shells  The korn-shell runs pipelines from back to front  the last element in the pipeline runs in the current process   Bash did not support this useful behaviour until v4 x  and even then  it s not the default   Another example illustrating consistency  The echo command itself  which was made obsolete by the split between BSD and SYSV unix  and each introduced their own convention for not printing newlines  and other behaviour    The result of this can still be seen in many  configure  scripts   Ksh took a radical approach to that - and introduced the print command  which actually supports both methods  the -n option from BSD  and the trailing  c special character from SYSV   However  for serious systems programming I d recommend something other than a shell  like python  perl   Or take it a step further  and use a platform like puppet - which allows you to watch and correct the state of whole clusters of systems  with good auditing   Shell programming is like swimming in uncharted waters  or worse   Programming in any language requires familiarity with its syntax  its interfaces and behaviour   Shell programming isn t any different

User · Answer

For one thing  bash has tab completion  This alone is enough to make me prefer it over ksh   Z shell has a good combination of ksh s unique features with the nice things that bash provides  plus a lot more stuff on top of that

User · Answer

I don t have experience with ksh  but I have used both bash and zsh   I prefer zsh over bash because of its support for very powerful file globbing  variable expansion modifiers  and faster tab completion   Here s a quick intro  http   friedcpu wordpress com 2007 07 24 zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need

User · Answer

Bash is the benchmark  but that s mostly because you can be reasonably sure it s installed on every  nix out there  If you re planning to distribute the scripts  use Bash   I can not really address the actual programming differences between the shells  unfortunately

User · Answer

For one thing  bash has tab completion  This alone is enough to make me prefer it over ksh   Z shell has a good combination of ksh s unique features with the nice things that bash provides  plus a lot more stuff on top of that

User · Answer

I don t have experience with ksh  but I have used both bash and zsh   I prefer zsh over bash because of its support for very powerful file globbing  variable expansion modifiers  and faster tab completion   Here s a quick intro  http   friedcpu wordpress com 2007 07 24 zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need

User · Answer

Bash is the standard for Linux  My experience is that it is easier to find help for bash than for ksh or csh

User · Answer

Bash    The various UNIX and Linux implementations have various different source level implementations of ksh  some of which are real ksh  some of which are pdksh implementations and some of which are just symlinks to some other shell that has a  ksh  personality  This can lead to weird differences in execution behavior   At least with bash you can be sure that it s a single code base  and all you need worry about is what  usually minimum  version of bash is installed  Having done a lot of scripting on pretty much every modern  and not-so-modern  UNIX  programming to bash is more reliably consistent in my experience

User · Answer

foxxtrot  Actually  the standard shell is Bourne shell  sh    bin sh on Linux is actually bash  but if you re aiming for cross-platform scripts  you re better off sticking to features of the original Bourne shell or writing it in something like perl

User · Answer

Bash is the standard for Linux  My experience is that it is easier to find help for bash than for ksh or csh

User · Answer

My answer would be  pick one and learn how to use it   They re both decent shells  bash probably has more bells and whistles  but they both have the basic features you ll want  bash is more universally available these days  If you re using Linux all the time  just stick with it   If you re programming  trying to stick to plain  sh  for portability is good practice  but then with bash available so widely these days that bit of advice is probably a bit old-fashioned   Learn how to use completion and your shell history  read the manpage occasionally and try to learn a few new things

User · Answer

Bash is the benchmark  but that s mostly because you can be reasonably sure it s installed on every  nix out there  If you re planning to distribute the scripts  use Bash   I can not really address the actual programming differences between the shells  unfortunately

User · Answer

My answer would be  pick one and learn how to use it   They re both decent shells  bash probably has more bells and whistles  but they both have the basic features you ll want  bash is more universally available these days  If you re using Linux all the time  just stick with it   If you re programming  trying to stick to plain  sh  for portability is good practice  but then with bash available so widely these days that bit of advice is probably a bit old-fashioned   Learn how to use completion and your shell history  read the manpage occasionally and try to learn a few new things

User · Answer

I don t have experience with ksh  but I have used both bash and zsh   I prefer zsh over bash because of its support for very powerful file globbing  variable expansion modifiers  and faster tab completion   Here s a quick intro  http   friedcpu wordpress com 2007 07 24 zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need

User · Answer

I don t have experience with ksh  but I have used both bash and zsh   I prefer zsh over bash because of its support for very powerful file globbing  variable expansion modifiers  and faster tab completion   Here s a quick intro  http   friedcpu wordpress com 2007 07 24 zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need

User · Answer

My answer would be  pick one and learn how to use it   They re both decent shells  bash probably has more bells and whistles  but they both have the basic features you ll want  bash is more universally available these days  If you re using Linux all the time  just stick with it   If you re programming  trying to stick to plain  sh  for portability is good practice  but then with bash available so widely these days that bit of advice is probably a bit old-fashioned   Learn how to use completion and your shell history  read the manpage occasionally and try to learn a few new things

User · Answer

Bash    The various UNIX and Linux implementations have various different source level implementations of ksh  some of which are real ksh  some of which are pdksh implementations and some of which are just symlinks to some other shell that has a  ksh  personality  This can lead to weird differences in execution behavior   At least with bash you can be sure that it s a single code base  and all you need worry about is what  usually minimum  version of bash is installed  Having done a lot of scripting on pretty much every modern  and not-so-modern  UNIX  programming to bash is more reliably consistent in my experience

User · Answer

For scripts  I always use ksh because it smooths over gotchas   But I find bash more comfortable for interactive use   For me the emacs key bindings and tab completion are the main benefits   But that s mostly force of habit  not any technical issue with ksh

User · Answer

Bash is the standard for Linux  My experience is that it is easier to find help for bash than for ksh or csh

User · Answer

For scripts  I always use ksh because it smooths over gotchas   But I find bash more comfortable for interactive use   For me the emacs key bindings and tab completion are the main benefits   But that s mostly force of habit  not any technical issue with ksh

User · Answer

Bash is the standard for Linux  My experience is that it is easier to find help for bash than for ksh or csh

User · Answer

Bash is the benchmark  but that s mostly because you can be reasonably sure it s installed on every  nix out there  If you re planning to distribute the scripts  use Bash   I can not really address the actual programming differences between the shells  unfortunately

User · Answer

For scripts  I always use ksh because it smooths over gotchas   But I find bash more comfortable for interactive use   For me the emacs key bindings and tab completion are the main benefits   But that s mostly force of habit  not any technical issue with ksh

User · Answer

This is a bit of a Unix vs Linux battle  Most if not all Linux distributions have bash installed and ksh optional  Most Unix systems  like Solaris  AIX and HPUX have ksh as default   Personally I always use ksh  I love the vi completion and I pretty much use Solaris for everything

User · Answer

For scripts  I always use ksh because it smooths over gotchas   But I find bash more comfortable for interactive use   For me the emacs key bindings and tab completion are the main benefits   But that s mostly force of habit  not any technical issue with ksh

User · Answer

For one thing  bash has tab completion  This alone is enough to make me prefer it over ksh   Z shell has a good combination of ksh s unique features with the nice things that bash provides  plus a lot more stuff on top of that

User · Answer

I m a korn-shell veteran  so know that I speak from that perspective   However  I have been comfortable with Bourne shell  ksh88  and ksh93  and for the most I know which features are supported in which   I should skip ksh88 here  as it s not widely distributed anymore    For interactive use  take whatever fits your need  Experiment  I like being able to use the same shell for interactive use and for programming   I went from ksh88 on SVR2 to tcsh  to ksh88sun  which added significant internationalisation support  and ksh93  I tried bash  and hated it because it flattened my history  Then I discovered shopt -s lithist and all was well   The lithist option assures that newlines are preserved in your command history    For shell programming  I d seriously recommend ksh93 if you want a consistent programming language  good POSIX conformance  and good performance  as many common unix commands can be available as builtin functions     If you want portability use at least both  And make sure you have a good test suite   There are many subtle differences between shells   Consider for example reading from a pipe   b 42  amp  amp  echo one two three four       read a b junk  amp  amp  echo  b   This will produce different results in different shells  The korn-shell runs pipelines from back to front  the last element in the pipeline runs in the current process   Bash did not support this useful behaviour until v4 x  and even then  it s not the default   Another example illustrating consistency  The echo command itself  which was made obsolete by the split between BSD and SYSV unix  and each introduced their own convention for not printing newlines  and other behaviour    The result of this can still be seen in many  configure  scripts   Ksh took a radical approach to that - and introduced the print command  which actually supports both methods  the -n option from BSD  and the trailing  c special character from SYSV   However  for serious systems programming I d recommend something other than a shell  like python  perl   Or take it a step further  and use a platform like puppet - which allows you to watch and correct the state of whole clusters of systems  with good auditing   Shell programming is like swimming in uncharted waters  or worse   Programming in any language requires familiarity with its syntax  its interfaces and behaviour   Shell programming isn t any different

User · Answer

Available in most UNIX system  ksh is standard-comliant  clearly designed  well-rounded  I think books helps in ksh is enough and clear  especially the O Reilly book  Bash is a mass  I keep it as root login shell for Linux at home only   For interactive use  I prefer zsh on Linux UNIX  I run scripts in zsh  but I ll test most of my scripts  functions in AIX ksh though

User · Answer

foxxtrot  Actually  the standard shell is Bourne shell  sh    bin sh on Linux is actually bash  but if you re aiming for cross-platform scripts  you re better off sticking to features of the original Bourne shell or writing it in something like perl

User · Answer

foxxtrot  Actually  the standard shell is Bourne shell  sh    bin sh on Linux is actually bash  but if you re aiming for cross-platform scripts  you re better off sticking to features of the original Bourne shell or writing it in something like perl

User · Answer

Available in most UNIX system  ksh is standard-comliant  clearly designed  well-rounded  I think books helps in ksh is enough and clear  especially the O Reilly book  Bash is a mass  I keep it as root login shell for Linux at home only   For interactive use  I prefer zsh on Linux UNIX  I run scripts in zsh  but I ll test most of my scripts  functions in AIX ksh though

User · Answer

Bash    The various UNIX and Linux implementations have various different source level implementations of ksh  some of which are real ksh  some of which are pdksh implementations and some of which are just symlinks to some other shell that has a  ksh  personality  This can lead to weird differences in execution behavior   At least with bash you can be sure that it s a single code base  and all you need worry about is what  usually minimum  version of bash is installed  Having done a lot of scripting on pretty much every modern  and not-so-modern  UNIX  programming to bash is more reliably consistent in my experience

User · Answer

Bash is the benchmark  but that s mostly because you can be reasonably sure it s installed on every  nix out there  If you re planning to distribute the scripts  use Bash   I can not really address the actual programming differences between the shells  unfortunately

[bash] Bash or KornShell (ksh)?

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