Korn Shell vs Bash

Difference Between Korn Shell vs Bash

KRS stands for the Korn shell. Korn shell was developed by David Korn many more years before the Bash shell. It merges all the features of shells like Bourne shell, C shell, etc. As the Korn shell is much older than the Bash shell, it has comparatively lesser resources and a limited number of users. There are various versions of the Korn shell released till now like ksh88, ksh93, etc in order to compensate for the limitations of the older Korn shell. Since it contains various features like associative arrays, dealing with loops, print command, etc, it is still used widely especially by the old Linux/ Unix lovers.

Bash stands for Bourne Again Shell. It was created by Freeware Software Foundation and was released under the license of GNU. It is open source and is available free for the general public. It also echoes some important features of the most popular Bourne shell with some extra features. As it is recent and is one of the most popular among Linux lovers. It has some special features like tab completion, emacs key binding, and the easiest way of setting the prompt for the user in order to display the current directory, etc which makes it more powerful than other shells.

Head to Head Comparison between Korn Shell vs Bash (Infographics)

Below are the top 10 differences between Korn Shell vs Bash:

Key Differences between Korn Shell vs Bash

Some of the key differences between Korn shell and Bash are given below:

1. Korn shell has a very amazing command, which is the ‘r history’ command that allows the user to quickly return the older commands whereas this facility is not available in the Bash shell.
2. Bash stands for Bourne Again Shell which is a clone of Bourne shell. It is licensed under GNU so it is open source and is available for free for the general public whereas KSH stands for Korn shell which was developed by David Korn which merges the features of many shells like Bourne shell, C shell, TC shell, etc.
3. The facility of Associative arrays is provided by Korn shell which is very useful for the programmer while programming in the shell scripts whereas Bash does not allow Associative arrays.
4. Bash allows the easiest way to display the current directory by setting the prompt whereas the same process is very lengthy as well as tricky in the Korn shell.
5. It is quite easy to exit codes from in the pipes and that too in a cleaner way in the Bash shell whereas the same task is a bit difficult for the programmer in the Korn shell.
6. Tab completion and emacs key binding are some of the most important yet new features which are quite helpful for the programmer while working with the Bash shell whereas such features are not available in the Korn shell.
7. When dealing with the execution of commands and the scripting files, the performance of korn shell is comparatively faster than that of the bash shell which performs the same task but with more time.
8. Bash shell is new in the market and is provided as the default shell in the Operating Systems, it is much more popular and gained a lot of public support in comparison to the Korn shell which is older than that.
9. Bash shell has comparatively more resources and is available free publicly so it is used largely by the open source communities whereas Korn shell is also popular but since it is old so lacks some new features and resources to be used by the community.
10. Bash is considered to be standard for Linux. and according to the experience of many people, it is easier to find help in bash as compared to Korn shell.
11. Bash can be considered as an extension of the korn shell as it includes almost all the features of it added with some new extra features.

Korn Shell vs Bash Comparison Table

Let us look at the comparison table of Korn Shell vs Bash.

The korn and bash shells are the combinations of the features of the most common shells, i.e. Bourne Shell. So both the shells can be used interchangeably and can be replaced according to the programmer-specific requirements. Below given is the comparison table showing the head to head comparison between Korn shell and Bash:

Conclusion

The above description clearly explains what the Korn shell and Bash are and the major differences between the two. Both are decent shells and function as interactive command interpreters. Both share almost the common features so these can be used interchangeably. Both the shells are standard shells, so it depends on the choice and need of the programmer to use them according to the requirements.

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