Linux ports of OpenBSD's ksh

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Although bash is a fine shell with many useful features, it does have it's problems:

BUGS
It's too big and too slow.

OpenBSD uses their own KornShell implementation (derived from the old public domain KornShell, pdksh) as the default shell, the codebase is much smaller than that of bash and benefits from the audits performed regularly by the developers. It uses less memory than bash and is also faster[1] but doesn't support here strings or numerical brace expansion; here documents & standard brace expansion work fine though.

There are two Linux ports of this program available:

https://github.com/ibara/oksh

https://github.com/dimkr/loksh

They both compile under Debian so I have packaged them up and added them to my OBS repository (the oksh package was ported by an OpenBSD developer and so should probably be favoured):

https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=home%3AHead_on_a_Stick%3Aoksh&package=oksh

https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=home%3AHead_on_a_Stick%3Aloksh&package=loksh

To change the default interactive shell either run

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chsh -s /bin/oksh # or /bin/loksh

Or set loksh as the ksh alternative and use that instead:

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# update-alternatives --set ksh /bin/oksh
chsh -s /bin/ksh

The configuration file is set by $ENV so add this to ~/.profile and/or ~/.xsessionrc to make it read ~/.kshrc every time a shell is opened:

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export ENV="${HOME}/.kshrc"

Note that the command line editing mode is determined by $VISUAL (or $EDITOR if $VISUAL is unset) so if vim is preferred then add this line to ~/.kshrc to restore the usual behaviour (ie, up arrow to recall the history, etc):

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set -o emacs

[1] Output of ps_mem showing memory usage:

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580.0 KiB +  96.5 KiB = 676.5 KiB       ksh
  2.4 MiB + 216.5 KiB =   2.6 MiB       bash

Size of binaries:

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-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.2M Jan 24 10:01 /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 264K Apr  9 19:13 /bin/ksh

Rough benchmark for loksh:

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$ time for i in $(seq 1 1000000);do [ 1 = 1 ];done
    0m01.96s real     0m01.90s user     0m00.09s system

Bash:

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$ time for i in $(seq 1 1000000);do [ 1 = 1 ];done

real    0m3.633s
user    0m3.586s
sys     0m0.061s

Bash with numerical brace expansion:

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$ time for i in {1..1000000};do [ 1 = 1 ];done

real    0m3.944s
user    0m3.876s
sys     0m0.064s

[4D696B65]

Correct me if I am wrong, I thought Debian dropped bash a long time ago and replaced it with dash.
A comparison between ksh and dash would be more useful

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I thought Debian dropped bash a long time ago and replaced it with dash

Debian links /bin/sh to dash rather than bash, yes: https://wiki.debian.org/DashAsBinSh

But this thread is about using loksh as the default interactive shell instead of bash.

See also https://wiki.debian.org/Shell

It should be possible to re-link /bin/sh to loksh but I don't think I would recommend it.

A comparison between ksh and dash would be more useful

https://forum.archlabslinux.com/t/inter ... rison/2691

[Bloom]

And Debian does have a Korn shell in the repos: mksh (MirBSD Korn Shell)

[Head_on_a_Stick]

^ There are several different KornShell implementations, Debian also has the original ksh93: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/ksh

The MirBSD™ Korn Shell does not share any code with ksh93 but both it and loksh are derived from the old pdksh package.

As I see it, the advantages of loksh over mksh are the GNU-style PS1 options, the support for bash-like keyboard shortcuts (such as <ctrl>+arrow to move the cursor across words rather than just spaces) and the fact that the codebase is from the OpenBSD developers and it is audited regularly by them.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I've added a statically-linked version (useful for rescue situations in which /usr is not available) and configured the packages to use all of the Debian hardening flags (-fstack-protector-strong etc), version bumped to 6.4-2

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Version 6.4-3 is now out.

This package will actually install on machines that don't have usrmerge, which is nice.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Version 6.5-1 is building now

It should be available soon.

EDIT: it's there now.

44 minutes after the upstream release, which was itself only a few hours after the OpenBSD 6.5 release; nice.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Version 6.6-1 is now available.

[milomak]

can i assume there is completion?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Oh yes, I find it has all the features I need for day-to-day use. It's a bit austere compared to, for example, grml's sublime zsh configuration but it's faster, lighter and almost certainly less buggy.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Version 6.7-1 of of the dynamically-linked loksh package is now available.

Upstream has switched from a Makefile to Meson and I have no idea how to make a statically-linked package with that so that will have to wait for me to upskill.

EDIT: there are no packages for Debian stretch because the Meson version is too old.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I've added another port to the OP — it's called oksh and was created by Brian Callahan (also known as ibara), who is an OpenBSD developer.