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Korn ShellThe Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories) in the early 1980s. It is wholly upwards compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history, which was inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users. As ksh initially was only available through a commercial license from AT&T, the FSF followed suit later with the Bourne-Again-Shell bash, currently maintained by Chet Ramey. The main advantage of ksh over the traditional unix shell is in its use as a programming language. Since its conception, several features were gradually added, while maintaining strong backwards compatibility with the Bourne shell. The ksh93 version supports associative arrays and built-in floating point arithmetic. Its advanced scripting functions put it on a par with specialised programming languages such as awk and perl. For interactive use, ksh provides the ability to edit the command line in a WYSIWYG fashion, by hitting the appropriate cursor-up or previous-line key-sequence to recall a previous command, and then edit the command as if the users were in edit line mode. Two modes are available, compatible with vi and emacs. ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee"). Until 2000, Korn Shell remained AT&T's proprietary software. Since then, it has been open source. Korn Shell is part of the AT&T ast Open Source Software Collection, which is licensed under the Common Public License. Although the ksh93 version added many improvements (associative arrays, floating point arithmetic, a.o.), many vendors still ship their own version of the older ksh88 as /bin/ksh, sometimes with extensions. SKsh is an AmigaOS version, that offers several Amiga-specific features such as ARexx interoperability. pdksh is a public domain implementation for Unix. External links
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