Re: [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

As an end user, you would not care. As a vendor or distributor, you would care. Anyone doing an OS or other software distribution (think the BSDs, of course; but also think Apple or Microsoft) needs to care. Anyone selling a hardware device with embedded software (think switches/routers; think IOT devices; think consumer devices like DVRs; etc) needs to care. GPL (or similar "virally" licensed) software carries legal implications for anyone selling or distributing products that contain such software; and this can be a motivation to use software with less-restrictive license terms. I'm aware of a few random features that are in ksh93 but not other shells (random, trivial, example that I saw just today*: "printf %(FORMAT)T"). That said, my first impulse would have been to say no, there aren't any meaningful (technical) advantages to ksh over bash -- except that it seems there's still some amount of active development going on in ksh: https://github.com/att/ast/issues/1466 So I guess, for some people at least, there are indeed reasons to prefer it, including (according to users in those github issues) performance. On the licensing front, the GPL is an issue for bash; but zsh is available as a more modern, fully-featured shell that avoids any GPL issues. This is why Apple switched the default shell in OSX from bash to zsh: they wanted to avoid the GPLv3. Previously, they had been shipping the last GPLv2 version of bash, which was from 2006. According to this blog, they've been avoiding any GPLv3 code and actively working to remove even GPLv2 code in OSX for quite a while: http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ -Jason * bash seems to recognize %(FORMAT)T, but only takes epoch seconds as an argument. ksh93 takes anything vaguely date-like. zsh and pdksh don't recognize it at all. for S in ksh93 pdksh bash zsh ; do echo "===> ${S} <===" ; eval "${S} -c 'printf \"%(%F)T\n\" \"last thursday\"'" ; echo "" ; done ===> ksh93 <=== 2021-12-16 ===> pdksh <=== printf: illegal format character ( ===> bash <=== bash: line 1: printf: last thursday: invalid number 1969-12-31 ===> zsh <=== zsh:printf:1: %(: invalid directive