Rubenerd

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m trialling the Korn Shell as my daily driver. I used tcsh for many years due to my preference for FreeBSD, but I prefer writing quick one-liners in Bourne.

Today I learned the Public Domain Korn Shell (pdksh) defines the following aliases automatically, as per the NetBSD ksh(1) manpage. NetBSD is where I first used the Korn Shell, and it’s bundled in its base system.

autoload='typeset -fu'
functions='typeset -f'
hash='alias -t'
history='fc -l'
integer='typeset -i'
local='typeset'
login='exec login'
nohup='nohup '
r='fc -e -'
stop='kill -STOP'
suspend='kill -STOP $$'
type='whence -v'

Sure enough:

$ type
==> Usage: whence [-afpqv] name  ...

I’ve seen manpages for other Korn Shell variants list more options, but I’m going to treat this list as canonical. It’d be a fun exercise to compare and contrast.