bash more bloated than ksh?

noir911 · 10-10-2006, 07:53 AM

It is told, especially by *BSD people that bash is more bloated than ksh. I did a ls on both bash and ksh on FC5 and found out that ksh is more bloated than bash.

ls -al /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 720888 Feb 11 2006 /bin/bash

ls -al /bin/ksh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 987008 Feb 27 2006 /bin/ksh

Does it mean ksh is more bloated on Linux or am I missing something?

ethics · 10-10-2006, 08:12 AM

you are judging bloat by filesize?

Just because the binary executable is bigger doesn't mean it is more 'bloated'...

I don't personally use ksh, only bash but it has loads of features i need, loads i don't know about. That is to say more builtins. I would consider these bloat if they were very obscure, quicker to do outside of the shell process and generally not needed. I think bloat is subjective, if you don't need the features, then yes it is.

trickykid · 10-10-2006, 08:53 AM

It is more bloated, as in.. it has more features and benefits than the korn shell, but then that's really a preference by the end user. Don't listen to BSD users or Linux users or any other user, try it out or read up on it yourself, or use both and you decide. If BSD users told you it's better to jump off a cliff than continue living, would you jump off a cliff? Think for yourself and don't judge something by the size of the file or binary, that means squat, really, it does.

slackie1000 · 10-10-2006, 09:13 AM

hi there,
and just to show how things can be different...

Code:

xxx@yyy home/xxx > ll /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 470K 2004-12-03 19:32 /bin/bash
xxx@yyy home/xxx > ll /bin/ksh
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 204K 2004-10-02 04:00 /bin/ksh
xxx@yyy home/xxx > cat /etc/SuSE-release 
SuSE Linux 9.2 (i586)
VERSION = 9.2

choose what is better by yourself.

regards,
slackie1000

jlliagre · 10-10-2006, 04:58 PM

Be aware that /bin/ksh on Linux is usually not ksh but really pdksh, so one could (wrongly) conclude ksh is bloated ...

Here are some sizes from Centos 3.7:

Code:

bash 2.05b01:  586132
pdksh 5.2.14:  180884
ksh93r      : 1006476