Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 199743
/bin/ksh should be the *real* (open-source) Korn Shell
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:26 EST
/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Closing this report, based on comment #5