HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 1 User Commands A-M (vol 1)

ksh(1) ksh(1)

might be expected to match all ﬁle names beginning with a lowercase alphabetic character. However, if

dictionary ordering is speciﬁed by

LC_COLLATE, it would also match ﬁle names beginning with an

uppercase character (as well as those beginning with accented letters). Conversely, it would fail to match

letters collated after

z in languages such as Danish or Norwegian.

The correct (and safe) way to match speciﬁc character classes in an international environment is to use a

pattern of the form:

rm [[:lower:]]*

This uses LC_CTYPE to determine character classes and works predictably for all supported languages

and codesets. For shell scripts produced on non-internationalized systems (or without consideration for

the above dangers), it is recommended that they be executed in a non-NLS environment. This requires

that LANG, LC_COLLATE, etc., be set to "C" or not set at all.

Be aware that the value of the

IFS

variable in the user’s environment affects the behavior of scripts.

ksh implements command substitution by creating a pipe between itself and the command. If the root

ﬁle system is full, the substituted command cannot write to the pipe. As a result, the shell receives no

input from the command, and the result of the substitution is null. In particular, using command substi-

tution for variable assignment under such circumstances results in the variable being silently assigned a

NULL value.

The contents of

here-documents

are stored in temporary ﬁles named /tmp/shpid.number. Care is

taken to remove these temporary ﬁles after their usage. However, because of design limitations, some of

these temporary ﬁles may not be removed.

AUTHOR

ksh was developed by AT&T.

FILES

/etc/passwd to ﬁnd home directories

/etc/profile read to set up system environment

/etc/suid_profile

security proﬁle

$HOME/.profile read to set up user’s custom environment

/tmp/sh* for here-documents