Technology Tales

Using Korn shell commands in scripts running under the bash shell

19^th May 2007

This is actually a fairly simple one: just prefix the relevant command with ksh like below (in the example below, bash won't know what to do with the print command otherwise):

ksh print "Hello, world!"

It's also useful for running Korn shell scripts under the bash shell as well.

Recalling previous commands in the Korn shell

18^th May 2007

The default shell on Solaris boxes seems to be Korn and the version that I have encountered doesn't appear to allow obvious access to the command history. In the bash shell, the up and down cursor keys scroll through your command history for you, but Korn doesn't seem to allow this. Thankfully, there is another way: you can set up the editor vi as the default method for gaining access to the command history by adding the following line to the .profile file in your home directory:

set -o vi

Then, you can use the Vi (it's pronounced vee-eye, apparently) commands ESC+h and ESC+j to move up and down the list of previous commands. That, or, assuming that you have access to it, just use the bash shell anyway...