This is the homepage for the original (AT&T) Korn Shell, where sources and binaries for ksh93 as well as information are available. It is a modern shell with many features for both interactive and script use, extensible, and can be used as shared library. It’s also locale aware and thus Unicode ready on most modern operating systems.

This is the homepage of the MirBSD Korn Shell (mksh), which is the actively developed successor of pdksh. The focus is a compact yet featureful shell, so several of the ksh93/bash/zsh extensions are present, while others, such as floating point arithmetic, will not be provided, even though the aim is as generic as ksh93’s (interactive and script use; embedding is not yet possible) and to be very portable, also to include some extensions of its own. It’s Unicode aware.

This is the homepage of the Public Domain Korn Shell (pdksh), where last development happened in 1999, when the original Korn Shell used to be commercial/proprietary software.

Beta versions of the original Korn Shell can often be found here.

This is OpenBSD’s version of pdksh, which has been enhanced and bugfixed relative to it and eventually spawned mksh. It has been ported to other operating systems several times: oksh in DeliLinux, OpenKSH by FreeBSD’s Tom McLaughlin, etc.

This is Debian’s packaging of pdksh, which includes several fixes from oksh and some of their own. These that were not bogus found their way into mksh. It spawned posh (the POsix SHell), which attempts to use pdksh code with Korn Shell features removed to provide a viable /bin/sh for Debian (and has since begun to take patches from mksh).

ksh88 was the AT&T Korn Shell before ksh93 happened. It lacks many features from later pdksh versions and especially pdksh/mksh. It’s mainly suited for scripting these days, and comes with many commercial/proprietary operating systems.

The MKS ksh is the one David Korn lost some disapproving words about. Nevertheless, it implements some part of the Korn Shell language and is available for certain systems.

getshver is a script that tells you which shell it runs under. It currently supports most Bourne Shell, POSIX Shell, Korn Shell, C Shell variants as well as the TCL Shell.

Prentice Hall PTR, xvi + 356 pages, 1989. Covers ksh88.

Prentice Hall PTR, xvi + 400 pages, 1995. Covers ksh93; co-authored by its creator.

Hayden, Revised Edition, xi + 490 pages, 1990.

IEEE Press, Part 2: Shell and Utilities, xvii + 1195 pages, 1993.

Online version of the POSIX/SUSv4 standard on shells.

O'Reilly, 360 pages, 1993. It’s a good introduction and reference to ksh88; most of it (except the DEBUG trap related part) also applies to pdksh/mksh. The ridge between shell scripting and shell programming is surpassed a few times.

O'Reilly, 432 pages, 2002. Second Edition of the famous ksh book from O’Reilly, targetting ksh93 this time.

Addison-Wesley Professional, xxi + 324 pages, 1991. According to the old #ksh topic, this is a “good book”.

Homepage of the project attempting to integrate ksh93 in Solaris, replacing both ksh88 and their Bourne (nōn-POSIX) /bin/sh. (Although mirabilos thinks that the old ksh88 should not be available as /usr/bin/oksh but rather ksh88, due to oksh’s existence as pdksh derivate.)

[DRAFT] Bourne/Korn Shell Coding Conventions

Basic tutorial for shell scripting, with focus on ksh.

Korn shell scripting is something all UNIX® users should learn how to use. Shell scripting provides you with the ability to automate many tasks and can save you a great deal of time. It may seem daunting at first, but with the right instruction you can become highly skilled in it. This article will teach you to write your own Korn shells scripts.

Generic shell-related newsfeed.

Plethora of historic and recent information on shells on various unicēs, the shebang, urban legends, etc.

FAQ of the Usenet group comp.unix.shell

Rather polarising article about why the C Shell is not desirable.

Part of the GNU Autoconf manual dealing with how to make shell scripts portable (if desirable to not target one specific shell, such as ksh93 or mksh, and making that one portable). Interesting for archæologists as well.

Greg Wooledge’s Wiki ⇒ Notes on process management, such as, how to properly kill one. Read also other pages from the CategoryShell, although his KornShell page is somewhat out of date and doesn’t apply to mksh often.

RSS/Atom aggregator with topics related to the command line.

Uwe Waldmann’s lengthy, exhaustive guide to quoting correctly.

Short tutorial for correct quoting in the pre-POSIX Bourne Shell, as well as the C Shell.

11-page article in IBM developerWorks by M. Tim Jones; Summary: Pointing and clicking is fine for most day-to-day computing tasks, but to really take advantage of the strengths of Linux over other environments, you eventually need to crack the shell and enter the command line. Lots of command shells are available, from Bash and Korn to C shell and various exotic and strange shells. Learn which shell is right for you.