This repository contains the AT&T Software Technology (AST) toolkit
from AT&T Research. As of November 2017 the development focus has
been shifted to the ksh (or ksh93) command and supporting code required
to build it.
The non-ksh code of the AST project is no longer being actively maintained. If you are interested in the non-ksh code see below for details on which branches contain the full AST code base.
The project only supports systems where the compiler and underlying hardware is ASCII compatible. This includes Linux on IBM zSeries but not z/OS. The nascent, incomplete, support for EBCDIC has been removed. See issue #742.
Building ksh requires the Meson build system. To build ksh execute these commands from the project root directory:
meson build
ninja -C build
You can add a --prefix flag followed by a path to the meson build command
to specify where the binaries and libraries are installed. The default is
/usr/local.
The ksh executable, helper libraries and man page can be installed with:
ninja -C build install
Latest builds for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (CentOS) and Fedora can be found in Copr.
Latest builds for openSUSE and Ubuntu can be found in OBS.
See full list of distros that ship packages for current development version.
TBD
Using MacPorts, the latest stable version can be installed using:
sudo port install ksh
Alternately, a development version can be installed using:
sudo port install ksh-devel
We have switched from the legacy versioning scheme to
semantic versioning. The first
release after the last stable, ksh93u+, release is version 2020.0.0 which has
numeric version number 20200000. This means you can still evaluate
$KSH_VERSION or ${.sh.version} in numeric context to determine if the
current shell is older or newer than a specific release (e.g., 20120801 for
the ksh93u+ release).
If the shell is built without Git metadata a hardcoded value is used. That value will be one of two things. If building from a stable release branch it will be whatever value was assigned to that branch; e.g., 2020.0.1. If building from the master, experimental, branch it will be the most recent major release number and 99 for the minor and patch levels; e.g., 2020.99.99. This should serve as a warning that you don't really know what commit was used when building ksh.
See the contributing guidelines for information about code style, unit tests, and other topics of interest to anyone who wants to modify the source.
See the guidelines for downstream package maintainers here.
Latest results of coverity scan can be viewed here.
A code coverage report can be viewed here for GCC on Linux, and here for LLVM/clang on macOS.
Warning: Running test cases through the legacy test script may wipe out your home directory (See #477). This has been fixed in current development version.
Full AST source code is available under the 2012-08-01-master and
2016-01-10-beta branches (see below for more details). Bug fixes to
these branches are welcome but they are otherwise under low maintenance.
The full AST code includes many tools and libraries, like KSH, NMAKE, SFIO, VMALLOC, VCODEX, etc. It also includes efficient replacements for a lot of the POSIX tools. It was designed to be portable across many UNIX systems and also works under UWIN on Microsoft Windows (see UWIN repo on GitHub under att/uwin).
This software is used to build itself, using NMAKE. After cloning this repo, cd to the top directory of it and run:
./bin/package make
NOTE: That build command only applies to the legacy branches that include
the entire AST source. It does not apply to the current master branch that
is focused solely on the ksh command and uses the Meson build system.
Almost all the tools in this package (including the bin/package script) are self-documenting; run --man (or --html) for the man page for the tool.
(If you were used to the old AST packaging mechanism, on www.research.att.com, this repo is equivalent to downloading the INIT and ast-open packages and running: ./bin/package read on them).
The master branch contains
the current development version of ksh93. It only contains source code
for ksh93 and the libraries required to build it.
The 2012-08-01-master branch contains the last stable release, ksh93u+, of full AST source code. It contains one cherry-picked change to allow building on Linux.
The 2016-01-10-beta branch contains the last beta release, ksh93v-, of full AST source code plus a number of patches that were later added on top of it. Changes for the legacy AST project are normally merged to this branch.
The gh-pages branch will probably be removed. It contains files needed to generate the static AST project page hosted by GitHub. See https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github-pages/ for more info.
This section needs more detail and clarity. The original README document
said the following:
Each package is covered by one of the license files
lib/package/LICENSES/
where is the license type for the package. At the top of each license file is a URL; the license covers all software that refers to this URL. For details run
bin/package license []
Any archives, distributions or packages made from source or binaries covered by license(s) must contain the corresponding license file(s).
The primary mechanism for interacting with this project is the GitHub project by opening issues and pull-requests and watching the project.
Use #ksh channel on freenode to discuss about AT&T KornShell and related variants.
ksh93/users is the Gitter chatroom for AT&T KornShell users.
You can track announcements and ask question or report problems at korn-shell@googlegroups.com or https://groups.google.com/d/forum/korn-shell as an alternative to watching this Github project.
Archives of the AST mailing lists (which is mostly about ksh) are available at: https://marc.info/?l=ast-developers and https://marc.info/?l=ast-users.
As of 2018-11-01 the AT&T hosted mailing lists no longer respond to email. Note that the precise date the mailing lists stopped working is unknown. That was simply the date it came to our attention. The last known message to both mailing lists was sent on 2018-03-15. Ironically, since you can't unsubscribe, they still send monthly reminders that you are subscribed.