The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories). It is compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history. For interactive use it provides the ability to edit the command line in a WYSIWYG fashion patterned after the vi
and emacs
editors. It also includes built-in arithmetic evaluation and advanced scripting functions similar to those used in more powerful programming languages such as awk
, sed
, and perl
.
ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee").
SKsh is an AmigaDOS-specific version and pdksh is a free Unix version.