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Does anybody still prefer Korn?

Yes, I do. Most of the guys I work with use tcsh, but I'm considered "old school".

You just can't go wrong with the classics.

Work servers have ksh. So I tried using pdksh at home. Seems it does not speak UTF-8. Back to bash.

Same here.

Any big feature do I miss by using ksh instead of bash or zsh?

Any big feature do I miss by using ksh instead of bash...?

No, not really. That is, unless you consider bugs to be big features. Or a lack of speed, for that matter.

And what bugs would those be?

Personnaly ksh annoys me because to go back in the command history in vi mode, you can only use Esc+K whereas in bash you can use both the up arrow key and Esc+K.

tcsh crappy vi mode annoys me too.

Understand, but I am a vi person :-)

For me it's easier to hit Esc-k than up-arrow, because while Esc is almost always at the up-left corner, up-arrow is at different position/distance on different keybords (e.g. desktop v.s. laptop).

tcsh crappy vi mode annoys me too.

What are you talking about? A true unix user uses vi, not vim.

At work I have to use ksh for scripting. It's 99% the same as bash, but arrays are a huge quagmire in ksh, and don't get me started on the 'set' command. I don't dislike scripting in ksh, but in the few ways that bash and ksh differ, I prefer bash.

I cannot _stand_ ksh as an interactive shell. I'm a huge vi fan, but it just does not make sense for command editing. I developed muscle memory on bash, with tab completion and up/down-arrows for history, and anything else feels incredibly awkward. At least seven times per day I want to kick down the door to the machine room and put a large calibre round through the freakin build machine that doesn't have bash installed.

Ahhh... I feel much better now... it's been a long day.

Does anybody still prefer Korn?

Yep. Learning ksh is still the best bet if you work with one or more of the big boys like Solaris or AIX. Just try to convince a big company to roll out zsh on all their machines - I dare you :-)

I work for a largeish company, and their Sun boxes all have bash and Perl and them (as far as I can tell), which I found to be a pleasant surprise. They default to ksh, but it doesn't take long to type "bash". :-)

Im a huge fan of korn. Im sure that bash provides most (if not all) of the same functionality but i always seem to be faster with korn and vi mode.

.adam.

I love zsh. Favourite feature: command, path, damn-near-everything completion. Slower and bigger than [batc]sh maybe, but on a 500+MHz plus box, it still flies.

I love zsh as well. It has an enormous amount of neat features and is very powerful. For a great starting point to see what you can do with zsh, check out this guy's dotfiles:

http://strcat.neessen.net/dotfiles/#zsh

Take your time and go through all the files; they're fairly well commented.

$ echo ~
/Users/strike

Well what did you expect? You're reading a write up on shell usage from a freakin Mac user.

Gibberish, you must mean /usr/share? /usr/spool?

sigil, not siqil.
See http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=sigil&go_button=Search
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)

Ah... that's different, never mind.

"TCSH -> obscure"

Maybe. I'll give you that one.

"ZSH -> lack of features"

You've got to be completely insane. Me thinks you've never read the docs on this one.

"KSH -> unmaintained"

Since when? Not only is pdksh maintained, but the pdksh used on both OpenBSD and NetBSD are fully maintained and get new features quite often.

"Why do we still speak about the others? If you can't do it on BASH use a scripting language."

Because I'm damn well not installing a non-standard shell on my BSD or Solaris boxes just to write scripts. This may ne a shocker for you, but Linux is not the only system around and bash is hardly a standard on any other UNIX/UNIX-like system.

Agreed. I've never had a problem with the arrow keys not working in vi mode. In emacs mode it requires a slight bit of hackery but still no big deal.

No I'm talking about the ksh installed on our Solaris 8 servers, I don't know exactly which version of ksh it is..

Try `set -o emacs`

Obviously you loose the functionality of the ownage that is vi mode, but you can use the arrows after that (at least on NetBSD)

No, I'm a vi guy not emacs (I never manage to remember the equivalent of Esc+/ search in history with emacs mode), I use Esc+K instead of the up arrow, but it is a bit stupid IMHO: two keys instead of one for a very common action..