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Bug 199743

Summary:	/bin/ksh should be the real (open-source) Korn Shell
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Kurt Lloyd <kplloyd>
Component:	distribution	Assignee:	RHEL Program Management <pm-rhel>
Status:	CLOSED NEXTRELEASE	QA Contact:	Daniel Riek <riek>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0	CC:	karsten
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-08-01 08:51:47 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Kurt Lloyd 2006-07-21 18:04:17 UTC

/bin/ksh has been "PDKSH" for historical reasons,
since the "real" Korn Shell was closed-source long ago.
The "real" Korn Shell is not only far superior,
but has been open-source for quite some time now,
and is still under active development, unlike PDKSH.

/bin/ksh should come from:

http://www.kornshell.com/

Mac OS X has it right, BTW.

Comment 2 Daniel Riek 2006-07-22 13:43:38 UTC

The ksh package is on the LACD aka "Extras" and can be installed as an
alternative to pdksh. Please explain why this is not sufficient.

Comment 3 Kurt Lloyd 2006-07-23 02:53:51 UTC

The reason is that Linux systems should be able to have this shell in its proper
location as the default.  Aside from being a great interactive shell, the "real"
Korn Shell is probably the very best shell script interpreter for shell scripts
that use #! in their first line.  A great deal of effort was put into it for
this purpose.  In such scripts, #!/bin/ksh is the standard, proper location for
it.  The default /bin/ksh should be the original, superior, and actively
supported version.

Comment 4 Daniel Riek 2006-07-23 20:26:02 UTC

I am sorry, but I am not sure I understand why it would not be acceptable to
install the ksh package from the LACD / Extras channel? That easily can be made
default in kickstart installations.

The pathnames in that package are default.

For RHEL5 we drop pdksh so only ksh will be there. There though is no way to
change that for already released versions of RHEL.

Comment 5 Kurt Lloyd 2006-07-24 02:49:25 UTC

If the "real" Korn Shell, i.e., the one from http://www.kornshell.com/ , will
indeed be /bin/ksh in default RHEL5 installations then this bug can be closed as
far as I am concerned.  Thank you.

Comment 6 Karsten Hopp 2006-08-01 08:51:47 UTC

Closing this report, based on comment #5