CHANGELOG.md

ksh git head (version TBD, this is a work in progress)

Deprecations

Notable non-backward compatible changes

Notable fixes and improvements

• A ${.sh.install_prefix}/config.ksh file will be sourced if it exists. It is the first config file loaded by every ksh instance. It is loaded regardless of whether the shell is interactive, login, or neither.
• A .sh.install_prefix var has been introduced to reflect the meson -prefix= value. This will be used to establish the location of supporting files such as man pages and autoloaded functions.

Other significant changes

ksh 2020.0.0-beta1 (version TBD, this is a work in progress)

This documents changes since the AST code, which includes the ksh program, was moved to Github. That is, the ksh93u+ source. The next stable version will be treated as a major release for several reasons. Not least of which is changing the build tool chain from the legacy Nmake system to Meson and replacing the AST Vmalloc subsystem with the platform Malloc subsystem. Legacy changes can be found in the various RELEASE files.

Starting in June 2017 maintenance of the Korn shell (ksh) resumed with the merging of some fixes from Red Hat by Siteshwar Vashisht after he was granted commit privilege. In October 2017 Kurtis Rader noticed that ksh had been open sourced and started contributing changes. This document was subsequently created to document the work being done.

Deprecations

• Some libc/libm math functions not suitable for use by a ksh script (e.g., j0()) will likely be removed in the near future (issue #1346 and #88).

Notable non-backward compatible changes

• The nonportable, unusable, fpclassify math function has been removed (issue #1346).
• The broken math functions nextforward and nexttoward have been removed (issue #1346).
• Support for binary plugins written for ksh93u+ or earlier releases has been dropped (issue #983).
• Support for coshell has been removed (issue #619).
• The universe command has been removed (issue #793).
• The getconf command has been removed (issue #1118).
• Support for building on systems using EBCDIC has been removed (issue #742).
• Support for the LC_OPTIONS env var has been removed (issue #579).
• case "[0-9]" in [0-9]) echo match;; esac has stopped matching. When a case statement doesn't match a pattern, it no longer tries to use the pattern as a literal string (issue #476).
• echo builtin now interprets escape sequences and parses command line options on all platforms. (issue #370)
• Support for the UWIN environment has been removed (issue #284).
• The experimental SHOPT_FIXEDARRAY feature has been removed. It is known to have been enabled in some Fedora and RHEL builds. But because it was experimental and undocumented this should not break any existing users of ksh built with this feature enabled. (issue #234)
• <> operator now redirects standard input by default (issue #75).
• Support for the build time SHOPT_ACCTFILE symbol and code has been removed (issue #210).
• Versioning scheme has been changed to use semantic version numbers (issue #335).
• Undocumented and broken alarm builtin has been removed (issue #646).

Notable fixes and improvements

• declare has been added as an alias for typeset (issue #220).
• local has been added as a constrained alias for typeset when used inside a function (issue #220).
• Mention of the getconf builtin has been removed from the main ksh man page. That command has never been enabled by default and is now deprecated in favor of the platform command of the same name (issue #1118).
• The test command no longer silently fails all uses of the =~ operator. Instead an error is printed suggesting the use of [[...]] (issue #1152).
• Doing [ -t1 ] inside a command substitution behaves correctly (issue #1079).
• The project now passes its unit tests when built with malloc debugging enabled (i.e., meson test --setup=malloc) or with ASAN enabled.
• Changes to the project are now validated by running unit tests on the Travis continuous integration system.
• The ksh source now builds on BSD based systems such as macOS and FreeBSD.
• The ksh source now builds on Cygwin; albeit with many unit test failures.
• The legacy Nmake build system has been replaced by Meson. This improves the build time by roughly an order of magnitude (issue #42).
• The times command is now a builtin that conforms to POSIX rather than an alias for the time command (issue #16).
• The time command now has millisecond resolution if the platform provides getrusage() and its time values have millisecond or better resolution.

Other significant changes

• You can no longer run an external command with stdin, stdout, or stderr closed. If you attempt to do so (e.g., a_cmd <&-) it will be opened on /dev/null in the child process (issue #1117).
• Vi raw mode is now the default and cannot be disabled. Note that this was true at least as far back as ksh93u+. The difference is that now it's no longer even theoretically possible to even build with that feature disabled. (issue #864).
• The AST locale subsystem has been replaced by the platform's implementation (issue #579).
• The AST Vmalloc subsystem has been removed. The project now uses the system malloc. (issue #396)
• Operations that depend on the simulated 3DFS behavior found in release ksh93v are no longer supported. That behavior does not work in ksh93u (the most recent stable release found in all distros) unless the 3D file system is actually present. This includes operations such as this: exec {fd}</dev; cd ~{fd} (issue #510).
• The math scalb function has been removed since it was marked obsolete by POSIX in 2001 and is no longer found in some libc implementations.
• Code hidden behind the SHOPT_ACCT and SHOPT_ACCTFILE build time symbols has been removed. The features are not enabled by default and I am not aware of any distro which enables them. Furthermore, they are huge security holes and should never be enabled.
• The suid_exec program has been removed (issue #366).
• The code has been restyled according to new guidelines (issue #125).
• Many features which used to be optionally included at build time are now unconditionally included (e.g., the code protected by SHOPT_MULTIBYTE, SHOPT_COMPLETE, SHOPT_BRACEPAT, SHOPT_RAWONLY, SHOPT_STATS, SHOPT_OPTIMIZE, SHOPT_SUID_EXEC, SHOPT_FILESCAN, SHOPT_POLL, SHOPT_AUDIT, and SHOPT_SYSRC).
• Unit tests can now be run under Valgrind and ASAN to help detect more bugs.
• Any code not needed to build and run ksh has been removed from the master branch.
• Fixes backported from OpenSuse (issue #377).
• Fixes backported from Red Hat Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distros (issue #172).
• Fixes backported from Solaris (issue #122).

Other significant changes taken from ksh93v-:

Last stable release was ksh93u+. ksh x.y.z is based on ksh93v- which was last beta release that came out from AT&T Bell Labs. It had number of notable changes that are listed below. Entries are directly taken from src/cmd/ksh93/RELEASE file (with minor spelling fixes):

• 14-12-02 The requirement that unquoted { and } must match inside string with ${name op string} has been removed (at least for now).
• 14-09-24 +When listing jobs, the shell now shows the directory that the job was started from when it was not started from the current working directory.
• 14-07-11 +Added -t flag and -P flag to whence and type for bash compatibility.
• 14-07-11 +Added -p flag to alias to output aliases for re-input.
• 14-06-30 +The variable COMP_WORDBREAKS for programmable completion.
• 14-06-25 +The -D and -E options have been added to the complete builtin.
• 14-06-19 +The -l flag to trap and the -p flag to umask were added as in bash.
• 14-06-16 +Added parameter expansion operator ${$parameter} for variables and positional parameters.
• 14-06-06 Added -a option to read which is equivalent to -A.
• 14-06-05 +Added -n option to builtin to disable builtins.
• 14-05-25 +Replaced the -p option for read with -p prompt. For backward compatibility, if a coprocess is running and prompt begins with - or is a valid variable name, -p causes the read from a pipe.
• 14-05-25 +Modified the -u option for read and print so that it accepts the option argument p to indicate the coprocess file descriptor.
• 14-01-10 [[...]] now supports hexadecimal constants with arithmetic operators.
• 13-12-05 If cd is invoked with no arguments and HOME is unset, it attempts to find the home directory and use that. Otherwise an error occurs.
• 13-11-14 +Added -f fd option to pwd to display the directory corresponding to file descriptor fd.
• 13-10-08 The shell arithmetic now recognized suffices f,F, l, and L for floating point constants.
• 13-10-07 The shell now prints an error message on standard error when a job specified with %job does not exist.
• 13-09-13 +The signal .sh.value variable is now a compound variable with the name value.q for sending a signal with -q and value.Q for sending a value with -Q.
• 13-09-10 +A -Q option was added to kill to pass integers as large as pointers. The -q option now only accepts integers as large as typeset -i.
• 13-09-09 Qualified print format "%([no]unicode)q" added to prefer \u[...] over \w[...] and override LC_OPTIONS=unicode.
• 13-09-04 +\w[hex] locale-specific code point literals have been added.
• 13-09-04 +The float(f) math function was added.
• 13-09-04 kill -q can now pass numbers as large as typeset -li and .sh.sig.value is typeset -i rather than a compound variable.
• 13-09-04 kill -q yields the processor and returns 2 when siqueue fails with EAGAIN and yield.
• 13-08-26 +Added 12 math constants such as E, PI, and SQRT2.
• 13-08-19 +The variable .sh.pwdfd which expands to the file descriptor number corresponding to $PWD has been added.
• 13-08-11 +namespace was modified so that namespace names can be a compound variable rather than just an identifier and namespace are no longer nested.
• 13-08-07 typeset -p (and print -v) now display the short attribute for typeset -sF and typeset -sE.
• 13-08-06 +You can now use the redirection <& {n} which is the same as <& $n.
• 13-07-24 The _ variable is now set as a reference to the type inside discipline functions for non-type variables in the type.
• 13-07-22 The .sh.sig variable has been modified to treat .sh.value as a compound variable containing int and ptr.
• 13-07-18 Assignments of the type name=(...) to array variables now preserve the array type and the variable type if any.
• 13-07-18 If a PATH ends in ., and you are in the current directory and this directory is in FPATH, ksh now treats this as a function directory.
• 13-07-17 ${!.sh.sig@]} now expands to all the .sh.sig. variables.
• 13-07-08 When using kill -q to send a signal, a CONT signal is not sent to wake the process if it is sleeping after sending the signal.
• 13-06-21 A -f nn option has been added to cd to change to a directory relative to a file descriptor of an open directory. cd -f nn is equivalent to cd ~{nn}.
• 13-06-06 In accordance with the standard set -u now causes failures for unset positional parameters.
• 13-05-29 ksh93 now intercepts the LC_TIME variable.
• 13-05-29 namespace commands are no longer allowed inside function definitions and now generate a syntax error.
• 13-05-10 With print -v for with nested compound variables, the output contains typeset -C for sub-variables that are compound assignments.
• 13-05-08 Added a ksh -n options that suggests that x=$((expr)) be replaced by ((x=expr))>
• 13-05-01 +Increased to maximum number of enumeration elements from 32K to 2G.
• 13-04-25 +The -K option has been added to set to sort indexed arrays of compound elements based on a list of keys.
• 13-04-18 Added serialization to processing of CHLD traps.
• 13-04-15 ksh now waits for background jobs started in functions contained in command substitution.
• 13-04-08 +ksh now sets .sh.sig.pid and .sh.sig.status for CHLD traps. The .sh.sig.status can be one of exited, killed, dumped, stopped or continued.
• 13-04-08 +The CHLD trap is now triggered with STOP and CONT signals.
• 13-04-03 +Functions that are used in brace group command substitution ${ ... } can assign the result to .sh.value instead of writing to standard out with the same result, but faster.
• 13-03-27 +The variable .sh.sig containing siginfo information is no set during a SIGCHLD trap.
• 13-03-12 Empty fields and empty arrays as type elements are not displayed when expanding a type instance.
• 13-03-11 The trap command now blocks signals that have traps until the trap command completes.
• 13-03-11 Signals that have traps that occur while processing a trap are deferred until the trap command completes.
• 13-02-08 +The -p option was added to enum to display the values that are valid for the enum.
• 13-02-07 +A preset alias named bool which is an alias for an enum named _Bool which has values true and false has been added.
• 13-02-24 Increased the maximum level of recursion for evaluating variables inside arithmetic expressions from 9 to 1024.
• 13-01-17 +User define math functions introduced on 10-03-24 now allow passing arrays as arguments.
• 13-01-10 +ksh now treats ESC-O-letter the same as ESC-[-letter in vi and emacs edit modes.
• 12-10-09 +read -d '' now reads up to a NUL byte.
• 12-10-04 libcmd builtins are statically linked into ksh93 and by default are bound to the path /opt/ast/bin whether this path exists or not. Changing the .sh.op_astbin variable changes the binding.
• 12-10-01 +Added the variable SH_OPTIONS which consists of name=value pairs. For defined options it assigned value to the variable .sh.op_name.
• 12-10-02 +Add the variable .sh.op_astbin to define the directory where several shell builtins will be bound.
• 12-09-10 +Added ~{fd} expansion where fd is the number of an open file or a variable whose value is the number of an open file.
• 12-08-30 For an associative array A, $((A[sub])) no longer cause subscript sub to be created.
• 12-08-20 typeset -H foo no longer un-sets foo when foo has been exported to the shell.
• 12-07-12 +Added -q option was added to kill to send queued signals on systems that support sigqueue().
• 12-07-12 +Added -p option to builtin to output builtins in a format that can be used to re-input.
• 12-07-02 +The -a option was added to trap to cause the current setting to be appended to the new trap setting rather than replacing it.