Difference between revisions of "Ksh"

Revision as of 11:39, 21 March 2013

Korn Shell (ksh) is a standard/restricted command and programming language developed by AT&T.

Installation

The version from AT&T can be found on AUR.

The MirBSD™ Korn Shell is another free implementation of the Korn Shell. It can be found in the community repo. Install with pacman:

# pacman -S mksh

The Public Domain Korn Shell is in the AUR.

Making Ksh your default login shell

systemd does not implicitly make use of a shell (previously, Arch Linux init scripts were using Bash). After the boot process is complete, the default login shell is user-specified. The chsh command can be used to change a user's default login shell without root access if the shell is listed in /etc/shells. (If Ksh was installed using pacman, it should already have an entry in /etc/shells).

Grab the full path for Ksh using /usr/bin/which:

$ which ksh

Which will probably output:

/bin/ksh

Change the default shell for the current user:

$ chsh -s /bin/ksh

Alternative as root, using usermod

Change the default shell using usermod:

# usermod -s /bin/ksh username

After logging back in, verify that Ksh is the default shell with:

$ echo $SHELL

Uninstallation

You must first change your default shell back to Bash before removing the Ksh package.

Change the default shell for the current user to bash:

$ chsh -s /bin/bash

Alternative as root, using usermod

Change the default shell using usermod:

# usermod -s /bin/bash username

Now you can safely remove the Ksh package:

# pacman -R pdksh

If you did not follow the above, you can still change the default shell back to Bash by editing /etc/passwd as root.

For example:

from:

username:x:1000:1000:Full Name,,,:/home/username:/bin/ksh

to:

username:x:1000:1000:Full Name,,,:/home/username:/bin/bash

External Resources

pdksh official page

Korn Shell at Wikipedia

pdksh man page at die.net

Home Page For The KornShell Command And Programming Language

pdksh man page at OpenBSD