Learning the Korn Shell

Preface

The long, tortuous history of the UNIX operating system has resulted in systems with all kinds of permutations and combinations of features. This means that whenever you walk up to an unfamiliar UNIX system, you need to find out certain things about it in order to use it properly. And even on a given system, you may have a number of choices you can make about what features you want to use.

The most important such decision—if you get to make it—is what shell to use. “Shell” is UNIX jargon for the program that allows you to communicate with the computer by entering commands and getting responses. The shell is completely separate from the UNIX operating system per se; it’s just a program that runs on UNIX. With other systems such as MS-DOS, the Macintosh, and VM/CMS, the command interpreter or user interface is an integral part of the operating system.

Nowadays there are dozens of different shells floating around, ranging from the original standard, the Bourne shell, to menu-based and graphical interfaces. The most important shells have been the Bourne shell, the C shell, and now the Korn shell—the subject of this book.

Korn Shell Versions

Specifically, this book describes the 1988 version of the Korn shell, which is distributed with all UNIX systems based on System V Release 4. There are various other versions, variations, and implementations on other operating systems; these are described in Appendix A.

To find out which version you have, type the command set -o emacs ...