A.3 wksh

UNIX System Laboratories released wksh , the Windowing Korn shell, in late 1992. It's a full Korn shell, completely compatible with the version this book describes, that has extensions for graphical user interface (GUI) programming in the X Window System environment. It runs on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and SunOS UNIX systems.

wksh supports the OPEN LOOK and OSF/Motif graphical Toolkits by making their routines available as built-in commands. This allows programmers to combine the Korn shell's strength as a UNIX systems programming environment with the power and abstraction of the Toolkits. The result is a unified environment for quick and easy development of graphics-based software.

There are various GUI development tools that allow you to construct user interfaces with a graphics-based editor rather than with programming language code. But such tools are typically huge, expensive, and complex. wksh , on the other hand, is inexpensive and unbeatable for the smoothness of its integration with UNIX-it's the only such tool that you can use as your login shell! We recommend it highly to systems programmers who use X-based workstations and need a rapid prototyping tool.

To give you the flavor of wksh code, here is a script that implements the canonical "Hello World" program by displaying a small window with that text in it. The code, taken from the wksh manual, should hold no surprises for X and Motif programmers:

#!/usr/bin/wksh -motif
XtAppInitialize TOPLEVEL hello Hello "$@"
XtCreateManagedWidget L 1 label $TOPLEVEL labelString:"Hello World"
XtRealizeWidget $TOPLEVEL
XtMainLoop

For more information on wksh , contact:

UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc.
190 River Road
Summit, NJ 07901
Phone: (800) 828-UNIX or (908) 522-6000.