FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Advanced Features of Korn Shell Scripting

The Korn shell, which can be installed separately as discussed in Chapter 8, contains some advanced features that can make shell programming easier and more powerful, such as built-in arithmetic and arrays. You should think carefully before using these features in a script, however, because virtually every UNIX system can run a Bourne shell script, but Korn shell scripts won’t run unless the Korn shell is installed and available. If such a script is highly specialized—requiring the advanced features of the Korn shell—and will be run only on your local system or on systems that have the Korn shell available, using this script won’t present any problems. If you are writing a shell script for public consumption, ...