On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 11:22 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

I get the historical interest, but in today's world, is there any
> advantage to ksh over bash?  I get that lots of scripts are run
> with /bin/sh and it is nice when that is fast, but aren't the cpus
> fast enough these days that it sort of doesn't matter?
>

Ubuntu chose it as the default shell for sysvinit startup scripts in 2006
(from which it spread to BSD) precisely because it was much faster than
bash.  It's also smaller: bash is a memory hog.

When I wrote a whole (batch) application in about 120 Perl and shell
scripts in 1999-2001, I often needed multiple shell scripts running
simultaneously, sometimes for concurrency and sometimes just from scripts
calling other scripts.  So I made sure everything ran under Solaris sh,
which was a modified Bourne shell at that time and so was much lighter than
bash, which I used for development.   Nowadays I'd use dash in the same
circumstances.