[webreac]

At work, in the scope of a migration from RHEL 6 to rhEL 7, I have spend a lot of time migrating scripts from ksh (pdksh) to bash in order to remove this dependency. I have not seen any advantage of ksh over bash. There are many differences (ksh is less strict), but IMO there is no point in keeping 2 mostly similar but incompatible shells when less and less people are using shell. I think ksh should die. Maybe I am missing something ?

[chasil]

There are TONS of advantages to ksh93 over bash.

-Floating point math, not just integer

-Coprocess syntax that is correct and compliant

-Genuine Korn retains variables in control structures

-Lots more, detailed in the Korn & Bolsky ksh93 book

The language specification for ksh93 is large and powerful, and bash doesn't approach it.

[derekp7]

The biggest benefit of real ksh, to me, is that variables don't disappear in weird cases, such as:

    cat file |\
    while read stuff
       do other stuff; set variable
    done

In ksh93, variables set within the while loop stay around outside of it. Whereas bash will run the while loop in a forked sub process.

[sli]

That just sounds like (practically speaking, if not totally accurately) local scoping.