Korn Shell (ksh), courtesy of David Korn at Bell Labs (1983), was once the elite’s shell—fast, elegant, and packed with powerful scripting features. Sysadmins appreciated its robustness and speedy execution of scripts. Problem: AT&T licensing nightmares stunted its popularity early on, and GNU-friendly Linux distros largely ignored it. Today, ksh lives mostly in legacy enterprises, older AIX and Solaris installations, and in sysadmins who enjoy mumbling “real programmers use ksh.”
