mksh is the successor of the Public Domain Korn shell (pdksh),
a Bourne/POSIX compatible shell which is largely similar to the
original AT&T Korn Shell (ksh88/ksh93).
It includes bug fixes and feature improvements, in order to produce a
modern, robust shell good for interactive and especially script use.
mksh has UTF-8 support (in string operations and the Emacs editing
mode). The code has been cleaned up and simplified, bugs fixed,
standards compliance added, and several enhancements (for extended
compatibility to other modern shells, as well as a couple of its
own) are available.
This shell is Debian Policy 10.4 compliant and may be used as /bin/sh
on Debian systems, in both /bin/mksh and /bin/mksh-static flavours.
.
The mksh-static binary is a version of mksh, linked against dietlibc
(if dietlibc exists for that Debian architecture), and optimised for
small code size, for example for use on initrd or initramfs images,
installation or rescue systems, or /bin/sh on slow architectures.
It omits some leaf features to be even smaller.
.
A sample ~/.mkshrc is included in /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples and
provided as /etc/mkshrc conffile, which is sourced by another file
/etc/skel/.mkshrc users are recommended to copy into their home.
