m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Fascinating. As I'd been in Sun OS, and started doing admin work when it became Solaris, I'd missed that bit. A question: did the license agreement include payment, or was it just restrictive on distribution?
Everything other than ksh93 is closed source. The POSIX shell used by various commercial UNIXes is based on ksh88. Sun tried to make this OSS in 2005 but "OSS lovers" as HP and IBM prevented this from happening.
ksh93 exists in a 1997 version with restricted redistribution and a 2001 version with OSI OSS compliance.
Oh, and to clarify what I said before, our production shell scripts, in the mid-nineties, were corporately required to go to ksh.
I didn't know bash till I got to CentOS (I don't remember it in RH 9...), and it's what I prefer (my manager and some other folks here like zsh), but bash lets me use all my c-shell-isms that I learned when I started in UNIX in '91.
Most if not all of these goodies are in the Bourne Shell now as well.
And bash still comes with a history editor that gives less features than the one I prototyped in 1982 and that is now available in the Bourne Shell.
Jörg