ksh: An Extensible High Level Language

ksh is a high level interactive script language that is a superset of the UNIX system shell. ksh has better programming features and better performance. Versions of ksh are distributed with the UNIX system by many vendors; this has created a large and growing user community in many different companies and universities. Applications of up to 25,000 lines have been written in ksh and are in production use. ksh-93 is the first major revision of ksh in five years. Many of the changes for ksh-93 were made in order to conform to the IEEE POSIX and ISO shell standards. In addition, ksh-93 has many new programming features that vastly extend the power of shell programming. It was revised to meet the the needs of a new generation of tools and graphical interfaces. Much of the impetus for ksh-93 was wksh, which allows graphical user interfaces to be written in ksh. ksh-93 includes the functionality of awk, perl, and tcl. Because ksh-93 maintains backward compatibility with earlier versions of ksh, older ksh and Bourne shell scripts should continue to run with ksh-93.