pdksh vs. mksh info [was: Re: Apparently, csh programming is considered harmful.]

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-12-14 21:10, Frank Shute <frank at esperance-linux.co.uk> wrote:
> I used bash for an interactive shell for about 5 years until I
> discovered the goodness of pdksh. About half the size, statically
> linked, not full of bugs and better editing features. Plus it's not
> GPL.

Hi Frank,

Now that you mention pdksh, have you tried mksh (in Ports too)?

I've installed it and successfully run moderately large ksh scripts
(like the webrev(1) utility of OpenSolaris), and it is about an order of
magnitude smaller than pdksh here:

% keramida at kobe:/usr/local/bin$ ls -ld mksh bash ksh
% -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  -  684699 Dec  9 19:51 bash
% -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  - 2390645 Aug 31 17:07 ksh
% -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  -  236202 Dec  9 18:34 mksh
% keramida at kobe:/usr/local/bin$ ldd mksh bash ksh
% mksh:
%         libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x280ae000)
% bash:
%         libncurses.so.7 => /lib/libncurses.so.7 (0x28101000)
%         libintl.so.8 => /usr/local/lib/libintl.so.8 (0x28144000)
%         libiconv.so.3 => /usr/local/lib/libiconv.so.3 (0x28156000)
%         libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x2824b000)
% ldd: ksh: not a dynamic executable
% keramida at kobe:/usr/local/bin$