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

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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 && echo one two three four |
    read a b junk && 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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

@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.

Answer 6

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.