“Can you engage in a little unadulterated advocacy for a moment
to offer some reasons why an informed user might consider using ksh
over bash or other popular UNIX shells? What does ksh provide that
other shells don’t? Similarly, can you give a realistic appraisal
of ksh’s drawbacks as compared to bash or other shells?”
“There are two different areas of functionality in shells. First
is interactive use and the second is scripting. Much of the debate
about shells has focused on interactive use only. For example, tcsh
is an acceptable shell for interactive use but practically unusable
for scripting.”
“In many cases the argument over which shell is best for
interactive use is based upon which key to press for completion.
This is a little like arguing that Solaris is better than Windows
because of location of the Control and Shift keys or that vi is
better than emacs because you you can save a keystroke or two. Most
popular shells have similar functionality with respect to
interactive use.”
“It is hard to argue that ksh is any better for interaction,
given all the features in tcsh and zsh. But the scripting features
in ksh93 are far more advanced than any other shell that I am aware
of. For scripting, I feel that ksh is more in the category of
perl/tcl/python and I would like to see debates/comparisons for
those languages rather than the antiquated bash/csh/etc….”