Squeezing Water from Stone - KornShell in 2019
2019-09-21, 11:55–12:20 (Europe/Berlin), Loft

Despite of it's old age, ksh still remains one of the most popular shells. In 2013, David Korn and others who worked on ksh were laid off from AT&T Bell Labs. This lead to speculations of death of ksh. In 2017, Siteshwar Vashisht and Kurtis Rader resumed it's development on GitHub. This talk will be about what makes ksh so challenging to maintain and how new developers are trying to revive it.

See also: Slides

I work as a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat and maintain Bash, KornShell and few other packages. In past I have been involved in number of projects like fish shell, Sailfish OS etc. Currently I am one of the upstream maintainers of KornShell.