This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune’s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness.

I hope I don’t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I’ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf). Ah, we’re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn’t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd…) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front.

I’ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of “those small things” of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work — we’re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code’s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it’s hosted on my current money source’s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples’ code).

Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar® like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, …)

ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)