pdksh - the Public Domain Korn Shell (Restored)

This is a restoration of pdksh 5.2.14, the final official release of the Public Domain Korn Shell.

Overview

pdksh is a mostly complete AT&T ksh look-alike. This version is based on the "patched" source maintained by Peter van Eerten (author of the BaCon project) to ensure basic compilation on modern Linux. This repository further restores the shell with systematic fixes for modern compiler safety and 64-bit stability.

Restoration Fixes (v5.2.14-patched)

To achieve a clean, stable build on modern systems, the following patches were applied:

• Signal Generation: Fixed siglist.sh and Makefile to work with modern GCC preprocessor output (removed obsolete -traditional flag).
• Format Security: Systematic fixes for -Wformat-security by adding explicit format strings to shprintf, errorf, and bi_errorf.
• Compiler Warnings: Suppressed -Wunused-result for system calls (e.g., setuid, setgid, nice) to allow for a 100% quiet build.
• Test Suite: Modernized the tests/th runner by replacing the obsolete getopts.pl with the standard Getopt::Std Perl module.

Building

Standard autoconf workflow:

./configure
make

To run the internal test suite:

make test

Credits

• Original Author: Eric Gisin (begun in 1987)
• Historical Maintainers: John R. MacMillan, Simon J. Gerraty, Michael Rendell (v5.2.14)
• Restoration: Mario (@wordatet)

License

The bulk of the code is in the Public Domain. Specific restorative changes are provided under the 0BSD (BSD Zero Clause License). See the LICENSE and LEGAL files for full details.