https://github.com/att/ast/issues/56

Pull Request for this bug https://github.com/att/ast/pull/57

Development Management has reviewed and declined this request. You may appeal this decision by reopening this request.

The patch used in rhel8 and fedora is different from the one initially proposed.
But it references the clone of this report, at bz#1471874.

One RHEL7 customer is using a test package with ksh-20120801-posix-exit.patch
but would like to have it backported to RHEL7.

Is there any reasons for not having a backport? The current behaviour is at best
confusing, and triggers from time to time. It is not only an explicit exit,
but also if the last executed command in a script does not handle a signal, ksh
kills itself with the same signal.

I have not backported the patch because it causes a behavior change. When shell kills itself with a signal, it's left to the parent process how does it interpret the exit status. For e.g. on rhel-7.6 follow these steps:

1. Start a bash process
2. Start ksh from bash
3. Execute `exit 257`.
4. Bash will interpret this status as 129.

```
$ bash
$ ksh
$ exit 257
Hangup
$ echo $?
129
```


now consider another example:


1. Start a ksh process.
2. Start another ksh instance from ksh.
3. Execute `exit 257`.
4. Ksh will interpret this as 257.

```
$ ksh
$ ksh
$ exit 257
Hangup
$ echo $?
257
```


Changing this behavior might break scripts and I would not want to ship such change in a minor release. That's why this patch has not been backported.

Also, I have made this request on several other bugs and I am repeating it again. We are working to revive AT&T KornShell[1] and recently we made an alpha release[2]. I would like RHEL customers to try it out and provide us feedback. Packages for latest release can be found here[3] or you can subscribe to our copr repos[4] for latest development packages.

[1] https://github.com/att/ast
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/korn-shell/7VAqQg1N5D8/XniWn__RBgAJ
[3] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=34360564
[4] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/ksh/latest/

  Is there a chance some patch is added for choosing behaviour?
Like what was done for bz#1454804 ?

>   Is there a chance some patch is added for choosing behaviour?
> Like what was done for bz#1454804 ?

Not unless it's causing some serious issues on customer end. We should avoid working around such issues with new configurations.

Closing this as wontfix. See comment 11 and comment 14 for details.