XPost: de.comp.os.unix.shell, comp.unix.programmer

On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 22:40:39 +0200
Martijn Dekker <martijn@inlv.demon.nl> wrote:

It may have been exactly a decade since the last one, but here it is at
last: a proper new ksh release. :) Many thanks to all contributors for

The ship sailed long ago, arrived at its destination, did a round the
world tour and was scrapped. Everyone uses bash or tcsh now unless there's
a legacy reason not to.

Roughly a thousand bugs have been fixed, including many serious/critical

Rather worrying there were that many.

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On 01.08.2022 22:40, Martijn Dekker wrote:

Announcing: KornShell 93u+m/1.0.0

Thanks a lot!

(Hadn't yet the time to install/test/use it, but appreciate the effort
and will certainly use it given the experience I made with the release
you provided quite some time ago.)

Or ask your distribution package manager to upgrade ksh93 to this version.

I'd appreciate if that would happen to replace "ksh" re-implementations
and the [older buggy] AT&T versions. - Maybe "93m+u" will replace the
original ksh (and the inferior clones) in a similar way as GNU Awk
effectively "replaced" UNIX (and other) Awk, i.e. to become the quasi-
standard for ksh. I'm keen to see how the commercial Unix vendors will
behave in that respect.

Janis

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Op 02-08-22 om 20:53 schreef Janis Papanagnou:

On 01.08.2022 22:40, Martijn Dekker wrote:

Announcing: KornShell 93u+m/1.0.0

Thanks a lot!

(Hadn't yet the time to install/test/use it, but appreciate the effort
and will certainly use it given the experience I made with the release
you provided quite some time ago.)

Neat. Lots more has been fixed since then and a few things added, e.g.,
'set -b' notifications no longer mess up your command line display.
Please let me know of any problems you find.

Or ask your distribution package manager to upgrade ksh93 to this version.

I'd appreciate if that would happen to replace "ksh" re-implementations
and the [older buggy] AT&T versions. - Maybe "93m+u" will replace the original ksh (and the inferior clones) in a similar way as GNU Awk effectively "replaced" UNIX (and other) Awk, i.e. to become the quasi- standard for ksh. I'm keen to see how the commercial Unix vendors will
behave in that respect.

The main ksh clone now is mksh. I would not it inferior. It's the fixed
version of pdksh and Thorsten fixed it properly. It developed in a
different direction, has a grammatically incorrect (yet OSI-certified)
licence, and it's not nearly as featureful, but it's solid.

Solaris uses AT&T ksh93 as their /bin/sh and they seem to want to use
93u+m, or at least they did some time ago. It took time to get it
anywhere close to my release quality standards, and now their team seems
to have changed, so we'll see.

But Debian, Red Hat and Slackware have already made it their default
ksh93 before there even was a release, so there's that. :)

--
|| modernish -- harness the shell
|| https://github.com/modernish/modernish
||
|| KornShell lives!
|| https://github.com/ksh93/ksh

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On 03.08.2022 06:18, Martijn Dekker wrote:

The main ksh clone now is mksh. I would not [call] it inferior.
It's the fixed version of pdksh and Thorsten fixed it properly. [...]

I have to admit that some time passed since I last looked at pdksh.
But there had been fundamental functional differences (e.g. pipe foreground/background processes) and it didn't have the features
I was used from AT&T ksh. The "inferior" was not meant to value
the software quality but those observable functional differences.
I haven't examined the differences between pdksh and mksh.

[...]

But Debian, Red Hat and Slackware have already made it their default
ksh93 before there even was a release, so there's that. :)

:-)

Janis

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On 03.08.2022 01:05, John McCue wrote:

Follow-ups trimmed to comp.unix.shell
In comp.unix.shell muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

Everyone uses bash or tcsh now unless there's
a legacy reason not to.

No, maybe everyone on Linux,

It's not even true for "everyone on Linux".

Janis

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Trimmed to comp.unix.shell

In comp.unix.shell muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:
<snip>

The ship sailed long ago, arrived at its destination, did a round the
world tour and was scrapped.

I miss the meaning of this.

Going my your name I'm assuming you're a native english speaker
but you've never heard the expression "That ship has sailed"?

Yes, I have heard that phase, but my confusion comes in
with the point/reason for the sentence. A group of people
are updating a shell used by a lot of commercial UNIX
systems, which I think is great.

Having this shell allows people on Linux/BSD to test
scripts using the real ksh without having to log into
that system at work. Avoiding hassles with VPNs, corporate
requirements and dated editing tools.

<snip>

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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Dropped from newsgroups: de.comp.os.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer

In comp.unix.shell, <muttley@dastardlyhq.com> wrote:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

Everyone, here being the small group you think representative.

The last 4 companies I've worked at all used Linux and bash was the shell. One of these companies was a major aircraft manufacturer.

I use bash when ksh is not installed, but it works differently and I
notice. I use /bin/sh when I need to, but it works differently and I
notice. No one is arguing that bash isn't used, just that it's not as
ubiquious as you claim.

I probably should have included zsh because of MacOS. tsch is used on FreeBSD.

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

I can't even remember the last time I had an issue with a bug in bash.

Since I use it more sparingly, and mostly under "fix some problem on a
random host", I likely have fewer opportunities to find bash bugs. I
find differences often. I will note this is a "ten year" collection of
bugs being fixed, and shellshock was less than ten years ago.

Differences in bash that bug me:

It's a _huge_ misfeature to me that lines beginning with a space are
excluded from history by default. (Most of the time I use bash, it's a
server I have just logged into for the first time. I need to type my
shell preferences out to have them.)

It's my opinionated feeling that in "set - o vi" mode, bash handles
multiline things in history wrong.

Bash 4 (?) introduced PS0 and broke old .profile settings for me.

I'm sure at least some regular bash users have encountered actual bugs
that I've missed.

Elijah
------
believes the ksh issues he knew about are fixed in this release

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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
[...]

It's a _huge_ misfeature to me that lines beginning with a space are
excluded from history by default. (Most of the time I use bash, it's a
server I have just logged into for the first time. I need to type my
shell preferences out to have them.)

[...]

I'm not a big fan of that feature myself, but I can see the point of it.
There might be times when you want to execute a command and not have it
saved in history. For example, on rare occasions you might need to
include a password in a command. Typing the command with a leading
space is an easy way to do that.

`unset HISTCONTROL` will turn it off, along the feature that prevents
duplicate commands from being saved in history.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
Working, but not speaking, for Philips
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */

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On 03.08.2022 at 21:22, Eli the Bearded scribbled:

It's a _huge_ misfeature to me that lines beginning with a space are
excluded from history by default. (Most of the time I use bash, it's a
server I have just logged into for the first time. I need to type my
shell preferences out to have them.)

This is site-specific. Arch and derivative GNU/Linux distributions —
I'm running Manjaro [*] here — don't exclude entries that start with a
space from the shell's history by default, although I personally like
that functionality and have added it to my .bashrc — or possibly to my .bash_profile; it's been a long time so I'd have to check.

There are yet other GNU/Linux distributions that don't exclude
command-line entries starting with a space from the history; PCLinuxOS
springs to mind, although its main upstream — OpenMandriva — does, and possibly Fedora as well.


[*] As of late last year or so, Manjaro now uses zsh as the interactive
shell in the GUI terminal emulators of all three official Manjaro
editions — i.e. the Plasma edition, the GNOME edition and the XFCE
edition — because the newbies like the esthetics of the
Powerline-10K-themed prompt, but it still uses bash as the main
shell for the system itself and for tty and ssh logins.

My installation on this machine dates back to long before the switch
to zsh and I've stuck with bash because it's the shell of my
preference. zsh looks nice visually, but it's way too different
and it's not a POSIX shell, which means that its behavior is too
unpredictable for my taste without first studying the ins and outs
of it, for which I don't have the time anymore.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
<snip>

It's a _huge_ misfeature to me that lines beginning with a space are
excluded from history by default. (Most of the time I use bash, it's a
server I have just logged into for the first time. I need to type my
shell preferences out to have them.)

I actually like this feature. At least one brain-dead
proprietary java application insist you supply the ID/PW
using command line arguments. At least that info is not
in history if I need to run a manual test.

But using ps(1), I can get admin IDs/Passwords if I want to
from the jobs the admins scheduled (I do not though).

One has to love closed source :(

<snip>

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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In article <2lprri-c25.ln1@paranoia.mcleod-schmidt.id.au>,
Gary R. Schmidt <grschmidt@acm.org> wrote:

zsh is big in Japan, not just on Linux boxes but on Solaris systems as

I switched to zsh as my preferred interactive shell, but code
in ksh on illumos, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris.

Kudos to Martijn for leading ksh's revival.
John
groenveld@acm.org

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On 2022-08-02, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

The only people in my experience that use tcsh are
RTL designers and verification engineers. It's quite common in the Synoposys/Cadence world,

It's the default shell on FreeBSD. I'll go out on a limb and say
that most people don't change it there.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

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In comp.unix.shell, John McCue <jmclnx@SPAMisBADgmail.com> wrote:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

It's a _huge_ misfeature to me that lines beginning with a space are
excluded from history by default.

I actually like this feature. At least one brain-dead
proprietary java application insist you supply the ID/PW
using command line arguments. At least that info is not
in history if I need to run a manual test.

$ umask 0077
$ cat > /tmp/foo
password=blahdeblah
id=827240261886336764177
^D
$ . /tmp/foo
$ rm /tmp/foo
$ bad-application --password "$password" --id "$id"

But using ps(1), I can get admin IDs/Passwords

Yeah, serious drawback for a long lived command, and race condition
concern for short-lived one.

Lots of _other_ places you can find passwords in history. Maybe you use
vim to edit /tmp/foo and get it in .viminfo. Maybe you set the password
in mysql and the command is in .mysql_history (I have recovered
passwords other people changed via that leak). I'm sure the list goes
on, and computer forensics types could share stories.

One has to love closed source :(

Sufficiently complicated open source is bad enough.

I recently reported a bug in Gnu bc, only to be told that it's
readline() issue and the maintainer doesn't know how to resolve it.
bug-bc@gnu appears to be an alias for the maintainer's address rather
than a list, so I can't post a link and must assume the message back to
me is private.

https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bc
"No such list bug-bc"

Elijah
------
would like source to bc implementation other than Gnu or dc frontend

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On 8/4/2022 4:06 PM, Dan Espen wrote:

muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2022 20:28:06 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:

Should. How often do you see it in practice?

100%. As noted in other posts, we use a number of different interactive
shells, and a number of scripting languages (tcsh, ksh, bash, perl, python, >>> tcl, et alia). And that's been true for every POE I've worked in for
the last three plus decades (system or processor OEMs primarily).

Don't believe you. I've seen more scripts than I can count that didn't
have the hash bang at the start. No idea what a she-bang is. Sounds like
a service for sailors in a port.

Well, where I worked, every shell script we shipped to customers had
a hash bang. Feel free to not believe me too.

Likewise, 100% of the shell scripts shipped to customers or used as a
tool has a shebang. If you don't know what a shebang is, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix) or just google https://www.google.com/search?q=shebang+shell+script.

Ed.

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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
<snip>

$ umask 0077
$ cat > /tmp/foo
password=blahdeblah
id=827240261886336764177
^D
$ . /tmp/foo
$ rm /tmp/foo
$ bad-application --password "$password" --id "$id"

I tried to get the admins to do smething like this
a few times years ago, but no luck and I gave up.

As a developer, I have limited access, just enough to
develop/support. A couple of years ago I sent the admins
the ps output but nothing was done. I suspect the vendor
said you have to do it this way, I can see the vendor saying
that, so they were afraid of making a change.

We have new admins now, so I may make another attempt to
show them the hole and see what happens.

<snip>


--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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XPost: de.comp.os.unix.shell, comp.unix.programmer

On Thu, 04 Aug 2022 23:23:05 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

That's why we always either use she-bang, or use the invoke the script

Wtf is "she" for? Its either called hash or pound depending on what side of
the atlantic you're on. Its never called "she" and I've never heard anyone anywhere ever refer to it like this.

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On 8/6/2022 3:36 AM, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2022 23:23:05 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

That's why we always either use she-bang, or use the invoke the script

Wtf is "she" for? Its either called hash or pound depending on what side of the atlantic you're on. Its never called "she" and I've never heard anyone anywhere ever refer to it like this.

Not sure I've ever heard it called anything other than a shebang prior
to this discussion but anyway, I already provided you a reference for it
at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix) and see also https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/149045/why-is-shebang-called-shebang for suggestions that it's derived from either of these:

haSH BANG
SHarp BANG

given that # is sometimes referred to as a hash or sharp character and !
is sometimes referred to as a bang character.

Regards,

Ed.

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XPost: de.comp.os.unix.shell, comp.unix.programmer

In article <tclltg$3r6oa$2@dont-email.me>,
Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Someone seems to be batting 1000.

Hint: It's not you.

--
Atheism:
It's like being the only sober person in the car, and nobody will let you drive.

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XPost: de.comp.os.unix.shell, comp.unix.programmer

gazelle@shell.xmission.com (Kenny McCormack) writes:

In article <tclltg$3r6oa$2@dont-email.me>,
Dan Espen <dan1espen@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Someone seems to be batting 1000.

Hint: It's not you.

A nonsense comment from Kenny.
Another normal day.

Ask yourself, what is he batting 1000 at?
Why would I want to be doing the same?

--
Dan Espen

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Dropping de.comp.os.unix.shell and comp.unix.programmer.
Let's stop inundating a German newsgroup with posts in English.

Muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2022 23:23:05 GMT
scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

That's why we always either use she-bang, or use the invoke the script

Wtf is "she" for? Its either called hash or pound depending on what side of the atlantic you're on. Its never called "she" and I've never heard anyone anywhere ever refer to it like this.

I've never heard the # character called "she", but the #! is very
commonly called a "shebang". The "sh" probably comes from either "haSH"
or "SHell". "Shebang" is an existing word in other contexts, as in "the
whole shebang"; that undoubtedly inspired the choice of abbreviation.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
Working, but not speaking, for Philips
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */

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XPost: comp.unix.programmer

On 07/08/2022 01:03, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

On Sat, 06 Aug 2022 12:30:52 +0100
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) wrote:

That's why we always either use she-bang, or use the invoke the script

Wtf is "she" for? Its either called hash or pound depending on what side of >>> the atlantic you're on. Its never called "she" and I've never heard anyone >>> anywhere ever refer to it like this.

People have been calling it that for ages. I’m not a fan but it’s not
new.

I've never heard it called that and I've been using *nix for 30 years. Perhaps
its an american thing.

Been in use here in Oz since the 80s, to my knowledge.

Cheers,
Gary B-)

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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

But what's the default shell on NetBSD and is it different on Panix?

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On 07.08.2022 at 15:22, Anssi Saari scribbled:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

But what's the default shell on NetBSD and is it different on Panix?

NetBSD uses ash (Almquist SHell) by default.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

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Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be> writes:

On 07.08.2022 at 15:22, Anssi Saari scribbled:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

But what's the default shell on NetBSD and is it different on Panix?

NetBSD uses ash (Almquist SHell) by default.

As users' default login shell? In case that wasn't clear.

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On 07.08.2022 at 20:25, Anssi Saari scribbled:

Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be> writes:

On 07.08.2022 at 15:22, Anssi Saari scribbled:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

But what's the default shell on NetBSD and is it different on
Panix?

NetBSD uses ash (Almquist SHell) by default.

As users' default login shell? In case that wasn't clear.

I believe so, yes. NetBSD aims for full POSIX compliance and ash is a
POSIX shell.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

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Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> wrote:

Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be> writes:

<snip>

NetBSD uses ash (Almquist SHell) by default.

As users' default login shell? In case that wasn't clear.

When you install NetBSD, yor are prompted to choose the
shell for root. IIRC, the options are:

1. sh (ash)
2. ksh (PDKSH, v5.2.14 99/07/13.2 per man)
3. csh (the real csh, not tcsh)

I picked sh for root.

When creating users, you can choose any shell that is on
the system. I went with tcsh from pkgsrc for my User ID.

John

--
[t]csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

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In comp.unix.shell, Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> wrote:

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

Note that I provided numbers for usage on NetBSD.

But what's the default shell on NetBSD

Don't know, but probably not relevant.

and is it different on Panix?

Users specify shell at time of sign up. The current web form defaults
to bash. When I signed up it was over the phone, and I'm not sure there
was a web form.

I will note that /bin/sh is currently available from chsh, but not from
the web form. That could be why it has such poor numbers.

Also, 'ksh' here is PD KSH, but nothing tells you that. Which is why I
expect real ksh has such low numbers by comparison, real ksh being
'ksh93' makes it sound like an obsolete version.

I don't remember how shell migration was handled when the switch to
NetBSD started.

Elijah
------
wasn't around for the migration from A/UX

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On 2022-08-04, John D Groenveld <groenveld@acm.org> wrote:

In article <2lprri-c25.ln1@paranoia.mcleod-schmidt.id.au>,
Gary R. Schmidt <grschmidt@acm.org> wrote:

zsh is big in Japan, not just on Linux boxes but on Solaris systems as

ksh is the default shell on OpenBSD, PD KSH v5.2.14 99/07/13.2.
ksh93 is in ports, AJM 93u+m/1.0.3 2022-08-25

I switched to zsh as my preferred interactive shell, but code
in ksh on illumos, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris.

Kudos to Martijn for leading ksh's revival.

Martijn, keep up the good work!


--
XMPP tool@disroot.org
DB4CE71C8DEF84257AD0B23E4D5934D90226C7F3 00010011 00010011 ▞

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