Other Extended Bourne-Style Shells

Two other shells are popular and worthy of note:

The Public Domain Korn Shell

Many of the Open Source Unix-like systems, such as GNU/Linux, come with the Public Domain Korn Shell, pdksh. pdksh is available as source code; start at its home page: http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/. It comes with instructions for building and installing on various Unix platforms.

pdksh was originally written by Eric Gisin, who based it on Charles Forsyth's public-domain clone of the Version 7 Bourne shell. It is mostly compatible with the 1988 Korn shell and POSIX, with some extensions of its own.

The Z-Shell

zsh is a powerful interactive shell and scripting language with many features found in ksh, bash, and tcsh, as well as several unique features. zsh has most of the features of ksh88 but few of ksh93. It is freely available and should compile and run on just about any modern version of Unix. Ports for other operating systems are also available. The zsh home page is http://www.zsh.org/.

Both of these shells are described in more detail in Learning the Korn Shell (O'Reilly).

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