David Korn: Ksh and the AST Toolkit
Abstract
The shell is one of the most important components of the UNIX operating system,
and one of the most widely used UNIX shells is Ksh, often referred to as Korn
Shell. Ksh was introduced nearly 25 years ago at the 1983 UNIX users group
conference in Toronto. The shell is both an interactive command language
and a powerful programming language. This talk will present a history of Ksh
and the companion AST Toolkit. The AST Toolkit contains Ksh as well as about
200 UNIX commands.
Biography
David Korn received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute at
New York University in 1969 where he worked as a research scientist in the
field of transonic aerodynamics until joining Bell Laboratories in September
1976.
He is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the
research division of AT&T Labs. His primary assignment is to explore
directions in software development techniques that improve programming
productivity. His best know effort in this area is the Korn shell, ksh, which
is a POSIX compatible UNIX shell and a high-level programming language. He is a
Bell Labs fellow and an AT&T fellow.
David is one of the principal
authors of the AT&T Software Tools package which was recently released in
OpenSource form. The AST Toolkit contains ksh and nmake as well as over
100 POSIX commands. He also wrote UWIN, (UNIX for Windows) which allows
UNIX commands to compile and run on Windows systems. He is currently leading a
project to move mainframe MVS Cobol applications to a Linux PC without the need
to recode or to reformat the data.
