Building Pdksh
Once downloaded, it is fairly easy to build a runnable version. The first step is to run the configure script. This is a GNU script that will generate a Makefile and config.h files. Some of the useful options to configure are:
| 1) configure | configure PDKSH and prepare for build. |
| 2) make | build binaries and docs. |
| 3) make check | verify the build. |
| 4) make install | run the installation step. |
| 5) set default shell | add pdksh path to /etc/shells for default login shell (this step is optional) |
| prefix=PATH | indicates the directory tree under which the binary and man page are installed (PATH/bin/ksh and PATH/man/man1/ksh.1). The default prefix is /usr/ local. |
| exec-prefix=PATH | overrides -prefix for machine dependent files |
| program-prefix=pd | install binary and man page as pdksh and pdksh.1 |
| verbose | show what is being defined as script runs |
There is also an option to enable/disable features during the configure step. More information about this can be viewed by running "configure -help | more".
For the Red Hat distribution of Linux, make sure that /dev/tty has mode 0666 (not mode 0644). Otherwise, you will get warnings about not being able to do job control.
The next step is to actually build the binary or runnable version and is done by running "make". If you get compile/link errors, look at the Readme file in the distribution for details. You may need to obtain the GNU public domain C compiler if you don’t have one with your system.
Once you’ve built the binary, you can sanity check it by running "make check". If you don’t have Perl available, you can also do this by running "ENV= pdksh misc/Bugs pdksh", where pdksh is the path to pdksh.
If it checks out ok, you can then install it by running "make install". If you want to make pdksh your default login shell, then you should add this to the /etc/shells file.