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The Korn shell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories) in the mid 1980s. It is wholly upwards compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell as well, such as a command history, which was inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.
For interactive use, ksh provides the ability to edit the command line in a WYSIWYG fashion, by hitting the cursor-up or previous-line or the ! key to recall a previous command, and then edit the command as if the users were in edit line mode. It was patterned after the ed editor, the basis for the vi editor, with an influence on command-line editing in the emacs editor versions.
It also includes built-in arithmetic evaluation and advanced scripting functions similar to those used in more powerful programming languages such as awk, sed, and perl.
ksh aims to respect the Shell Language Standard (POSIX 1003.2 "Shell and Utilities Language Committee").
Until 2000, Korn Shell remained AT&T's proprietary software. Since then, it has been open source. Korn Shell is part of the AT&T ast Open Source Software Collection, which is licensed under the Common Public License.
SKsh is an AmigaOS version, that offers several Amiga-specific features such as ARexx interoperability.
pdksh is a public domain implementation for Unix.
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