Rubenerd: Versions of ksh93 in macOS, FreeBSD

There’s not much point to this post; it was bourne of some idle curiosity. Ah man, that pun was top shelf. macOS has shipped with the KornShell since Tiger, but I was interested to see which version it had. Here’s 10.14 Mojave:

$ /bin/ksh --version
    version sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01

I’d been installing it with Homebrew (via Ansible) since I switched to it as my primary interactive shell, but it’s the same:

$ /usr/local/bin/ksh --version
    version sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01

The latest version from FreeBSD ports is fresher:

$ ksh93 --version
    version sh (AT&T Research) 93v- 2014-12-24

Although I had a treat:

# pkg upgrade ksh93
==> [...]
==> Installed packages to be UPGRADED:
==> ksh93: 20141224 -> 2020.0.0.a1,1

The port’s commit history shows a lot of changes over the last month which I’m still mentally processing.

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