Bash or KornShell (ksh)? [closed]

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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/

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.