Hi all! I'm new to OpenSolaris, and have just been poking around to see what was going on, and this project caught my eye. I've always been a big fan of ksh, and am glad to see the work on ksh93. I can't tell you how many times read -t would have been useful to have for shell programming, or how many kludgie ways I've tried to make that work.
Anyway, I downloaded the tarball to see what it included, and I was surprised to see a copy of ksh93, rksh93, and pfksh93 targeted for /sbin. I did a file on them, and am wondering why they are dynamically linked. Will they be statically linked in the future? I ask, because it would be nice to have a ksh of some type that was statically linked for root. I had a jr. admin mess up the entry for /usr in /etc/vfstab once (working with Online/Solstice disksuite), and of course we didn't realize it until after the system had been rebooted. I was eventually able to get the system booted with boot -sb (boot without running fsck), logged in as root with the statically linked /sbin/sh, and was able to do a /sbin/mount to manually mount /usr read-only, fsck'd /, remounted / read-write, and eventually fixed the problem. This had to be back around Solaris 2.3, or early 2.4, and ever since I have been real touchy about changing root's login shell to a dynamically linked version. I know that these days almost every system has a CD/DVD drive, and I've had a jumpstart server in every environment that I've worked in for the last 10 years, so boot cdrom -s and boot net -s could fix the problem easier than what I had to stumble through back in '95. However, when you learn a lesson the hard way, it kind of sticks with you... Of course, if / is mounted read-only for whatever reason, I guess there could be problems with writting the commands entered to the HISTFILE. Anyway, I'd like to thank everyone working on this project! I'm really looking forward to seeing this as a standard part of Solaris. (for the fun of it, I tested a mangled entry for /usr on Solaris 10, and SMF was nice enough to automatically stop at single-user when it figured out that it couldn't mount /usr, or run /usr/sbin/fsck. so, I didn't have to boot -sb to fix it - nice) This message posted from opensolaris.org
