ksh93 problems (ksh 2020)

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Shortly after the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ksh was reverted back to version 93u+.

ksh (2020.0.0+really93u+20120801-6) unstable; urgency=high

  * v2020 of ksh is no longer being maintained and upstream repository has
    been reverted back to the last stable version of 93u+. This update
    reverts back the ksh2020 changes back to the original ksh93 from AT&T.
  * Patch for CVE-2019-14868 - certain environment variables were
    interpreted as arithmetic expressions on startup, leading to code
    injection

 -- Anuradha Weeraman <email address hidden> Sat, 27 Jun 2020 21:17:32 -0400

It might be possible to create an SRU of ksh to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that also reverts it to revision 93u. The SRU process is documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates.

I did manually install ksh93u and all is back to normal on my machine. However, the 2020 package still gets reported in synaptic, hiding all mention of ksh93. Even under the "Installed (manual)" section, ksh is listed, but still reported as version 2020. There is no recognition of 93u being in the local package DB, even though it is there! So I agree that what Brian is suggesting would be a good thing to get these repositories to 1) distinguish between 93u and 2020, and 2) get 93u listed as the default package, to avoid a lot of confusion. Since it was already replaced shortly after the 20.04 release, this seems like a well tested option that can be adopted without causing regression problems.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Highly recommend that the action proposed in #2 is taken. (If I understand it correctly).

In my opinion: The 2020 version has nothing to do as main package for ksh, and absolutely not in an LTS release.

As for the bug experienced by OP it is ugly. The history loading is botched and have several bugs. When history reaches a limit of N bytes it does no longer write to history file. It then opens a new file descriptor to the history file for each command. On for example Linux this can give something like:

 $ find /proc/PID-of-ksh/fd -lname '*/.sh_history' | wc -l
 746

(Opinion on the 2020 project) Sure there was honest intentions to make it better, but from the looks of things there was very little understanding and respect in the mix. It seemed more important to paint Korn as a crazy spaghetti coder who obfuscate with intent – then understanding the code. Think that is sad.

We recommend upgrading to the latest ksh93u+m (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ksh93u+m) which reverts ksh2020, and builds upon 93u+. Please file a report if you do see any issues.