# Korn Shell in Tiger?



## quiksan (Apr 14, 2005)

According to the new Tiger features page, the Korn Shell will be the new unix shell in OS X.  
When is Apple going to settle on one shell?  It's the subtle nuances that drive me crazy across the shells, and while I'm not a total unix novice, it's still frustrating that they've changed the shell the last 2 major iterations of OS X.

Am I alone on this or what?


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## Lycander (Apr 15, 2005)

We can still pick which shell to use though right? In Terminal.app prefs?


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## quiksan (Apr 15, 2005)

Yes.
I guess it's nice to have options.  But I'd just rather have one and stick with it.

my problem is I wanna try everything out and see if I like it better.  so I'll make the move up to KSH when I get Tiger...


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## Viro (Apr 15, 2005)

Why are they moving shells? It was tcsh in Jaguar, bash in Panther and now ksh in Tiger? What's the reason for the move?


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## Lycander (Apr 15, 2005)

So you like to try out different things to see if you like them better, but you're not happy when someone gives you something to try... are you a woman by chance? hehe


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## cfleck (Apr 15, 2005)

Are you sure?  Who even uses ksh these days?


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## quiksan (Apr 15, 2005)

here's the page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/newfeatures.html
notice down under unix...

Lycander - good point.  Dang!  I'm gonna go cry about all this now.  

I guess it's really my own problem...it's in me to try every new thing.  It's just Apple's constantly introducing a new shell gets my curiosity going, which requires me to spend time on the new [insert tech here].  I'm sure it's better - why else would they have done it? - but why did it take 3 changes to get there?
Don't get me wrong - I love new tech (why else do I try it all out?)  It's just the subtle nuances in CLI shells that drive me nuts.  

oh well.


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## artov (Apr 15, 2005)

Like the web page tells, Korn Shell is there because there are existing
Korn Shell scripts. For example when I installed DB2 onto a Linux server,
I had to first install Korn Shell, since some installation scripts needed it.

(I myself use zsh, even if I know only about 10% of its features. But what I 
know, I like a lot. For example, the ** wildcard drops all simple find -jobs; 
to view all PDF files type "open ~/Documents/**/*.pdf")


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## lurk (Apr 15, 2005)

It doesn't say that they will be making ksh the default, only that they will be including it.  I expect that bash will still be the default.  Historically the problem was that AT&T thought so highly of ksh that you had to pay for it; so you would only find it in commercial Unices.  There was an attempt to clone it with pdksh but that was never really close enough.


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## mkwan (Apr 16, 2005)

I have tried ksh on SCO machine and don't like it.  I would rather stick with bash


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## scruffy (Apr 16, 2005)

use chsh to change your shell - that will drop you into a editing a little text file in vi (or whatever your EDITOR environment variable is).  Change your shell to whatever program you want.

I agree though - pick a shell and stick with it.  I mean, what's next?  At some point they'll have to run out of shells...


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## btoneill (Apr 19, 2005)

All they are doing is _adding_ ksh to the standard distribution. They are not changing shells again. And as for the change from csh to bash as the default shell, that was the smartest move they have ever made. csh is the worst shell possible, and should never be used for anything. See http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

Brian


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