Below are some of the known issues/work for ksh93 that are/were
under discussion. Roland and I will be discussing these issues further
with our PSARC sponsor, Don Cragun, tomorrow.
April
1. Built-ins bound to /usr/ast/bin
All 30 of the libcmd built-ins will be bound to /usr/ast/bin.
Currently /usr/ast/bin and its corresponding executable
file need to exist for such built-ins to be invoked.
Roland has let me know this is a just a bug to be fixed.
The invocation of /usr/ast/bin built-ins should not
require /usr/ast/bin. Note that this would work
differently than the built-ins bound to /bin (see #3),
which will require the existence of the corresponding
executable in /bin.
2. Moving ksh93 to the root filesystem.
Since ksh93 is being proposed as a hardlink to /usr/lib/isaexec,
to allow execution of 64-bit ksh93 by default on 64-bit systems,
moving ksh93 to the root filesystem would entail moving isaexec to
the root filesystem as well, affecting any other file which links
to isaexec. Although isaexec is probably only used by files in
the ON consolidation, there is also a technical
difficulty in that if symlinking from /usr/bin/ksh93 to /lib/isaexec,
isaexec will look for an ISA-specific file
named "isaexec" under /lib. This must be a symlink because
hardlinking across filesystems is not allowed.
Possible solutions:
a) Have only the 32-bit ksh93 binary available on the root
filesystem; no isaexec required on root.
/usr/bin/ksh93 hardlinks to /usr/lib/isaexec
which will execute either the 32-bit or 64-bit ksh93
under /usr/bin/<isa>
/usr/bin/{sparcv7,i86}/ksh93 symlinks to the 32-bit /sbin/ksh93 binary
/usr/bin/{sparcv9,amd64}/ksh93 is the 64-bit ksh93 binary
/sbin/ksh93 is the 32-bit ksh93 binary
Thus those who wish to use ksh93 exclusively on the root filesystem
can invoke the 32-bit binary /sbin/ksh93, without using isaexec.
Pro: Only one copy of isaexec needed
Con: Inconsistent locations for 32-bit and 64-bit ksh93;
scripts invoking /sbin/ksh93 may expect it to work the same as
/usr/bin/ksh93 but not get the expected 64-bit memory and address
space.
b) Two copies of isaexec: in /usr/lib (the current location)
and /lib (on the root filesystem).
Pro: Consistent ksh93 location; possible usage of /lib/isaexec by
other applications.
Con: Two copies of isaexec
3. Built-ins
New ksh93 built-ins, replicating functionality in /usr/bin
sleep
printf
The current set of built-ins to be bound to /bin are:
cat
chown
head
mkdir
rmdir
tee
uniq
wc
Note that chmod has been removed from the /bin list,
since there is known Solaris functionality (the recent ACL work)
that is not in AT&T chmod, and the outbound review is not
yet approved to contribute Solaris code to AT&T.
sleep has also been removed from the /bin list, since it is
already a regular built-in in ksh93, not bound to a pathname.
If in ksh93, the built-in is invoked by default instead of the
Solaris utility, the ksh93 built-in needs to be compatible to the
Solaris utility behavior. This could be true for any users with /bin
on their path. ksh93 users should not have to call
the full pathname to the Solaris-compatible behavior.
Some differences in behavior, compared with
the Solaris /usr/bin utility, were seen for the
ksh93 built-ins for mkdir, uniq, and printf. The below
cases are similar to those executed in the VSC standards
conformance test.
I'm assuming that these are considered bugs and will be fixed.
Details:
a) uniq
When using the -f and -s options together, uniq should skip
the given number of fields, immediately followed by the given
number of chars, before comparing adjacent lines for matching
lines. A field is defined by the maximumal
string matched by the basic regular expression
[[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]*
(zero or more blanks followed by zero or more non-blanks)
Example:
If input1 file contains:
field1 field2 field3 abcd
field1 field2 field3 abce
abc
uniq -f 3 -s 4 input1
should output
field1 field2 field3 abcd
Using the ksh93 built-in uniq:
uniq -f 3 -s 4 input
outputs
field1 field2 field3 abcd
AT&T uniq skips the first three fields
"field1 field2 field3", then apparently starts skipping
characters starting at the next non-blank character,
"abcd", instead of at the space character following field3,
" abcd".
b) printf
printf "<format>" "'<char>" does not work the same as Solaris ksh
when <format> is one of these formats: %e, %E, %f, %g, %G.
It is expected that a single quote followed by a character will
output the numerical codeset (ASCII value) of the character.
ksh93 printf works the same as Solaris ksh if <format> is %d, %i, %o, %u,
%x, %X.
Example:
printf "%f" "'-"
should print out the floating point number for the
ASCII value of the character which follows the single
quote. The numeric value of the dash (-) character is 45,
so 45.000000 is expected.
It is expected that the above should output the same value as
printf "%f" "45"
In ksh93, printf built-in outputs an error and prints the equivalent of 0:
printf "%f" "'-"
printf: '-: invalid character constant
printf: warning: invalid argument of type f
0.0000000
c) mkdir
From Solaris mkdir(1) manpage:
DESCRIPTION
The mkdir command creates the named directories in mode 777
(possibly altered by the file mode creation mask umask(1)).
...
OPTIONS
...
-p With this option, mkdir creates dir by
creating all the non-existing parent direc-
tories first. The mode given to intermediate
directories will be the difference between
777 and the bits set in the file mode crea-
tion mask. The difference, however, must be
at least 300 (write and execute permission
for the user).
therefore, with umask 202, mkdir -p a/b/c
should create file modes for intermediate parent dirs
a and a/b of 777 less 202 permissions plus 300 permissions, that is:
rwxrwxr-x
But for the final dir a/b/c, the 300 rule doesn't apply,
so it's 777 less 202 permissions:
r-xrwxr-x
Solaris /bin/mkdir:
$ umask 202
$ /bin/mkdir -p a/b/c
$ ls -ld a a/b a/b/c
drwxrwxr-x 3 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:16 a
drwxrwxr-x 3 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:16 a/b
dr-xrwxr-x 2 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:16 a/b/c
$ /bin/rm -rf a
ksh93 built-in mkdir:
$ mkdir -p a/b/c
$ ls -ld a a/b a/b/c
drwxrwxr-x 3 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:17 a
drwxrwxr-x 3 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:17 a/b
drwxrwxr-x 2 chin staff 512 Aug 14 15:17 a/b/c
Note that the permissions of the final dir, a/b/c, still adds the 300
permission mode back in.
4. Manpage changes
The diff-marked manpages are required to submit the ARC case.
However, some of the manpage changes may be dependent upon
what happens with the above issues.
5. I18N
ksh93 may need additional changes to allow it to deliver messages
to the localization groups.
