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A.9. Workalikes on PC Platforms

The proliferation of the Korn shell has not stopped at the boundaries of Unix-dom. Many programmers who got their initial experience on Unix systems and subsequently crossed over into the PC world wished for a nice Unix-like environment (especially when faced with the horrors of the MS-DOS command line!), so it's not surprising that several Unix shell-style interfaces to small-computer operating systems have appeared, Korn shell emulations among them.

In the past several years, not just shell clones have appeared, but entire Unix "environments." Two of them use shells that we've already discussed. Two others provide their own shell reimplementations. Providing lists of major and minor differences is counterproductive. Instead, this section describes each environment in turn (in alphabetical order), along with contact and Internet download information.

A.9.3. MKS Toolkit

Perhaps the most established Unix environment for the PC world is the MKS Toolkit from Mortice Kern Systems:

MKS Canada - Corporate Headquarters
410 Albert Street
Waterloo, ON  N2L 3V3
Canada
(519) 884-2251
(519) 884-8861 (fax)
(800) 265-2797 (sales)
http://www.mks.com

The MKS Toolkit comes in various versions depending upon the development environment and the number of developers who will be using it. It includes a shell that is POSIX compliant, along with just about all the features of the 1988 Korn shell, as well as over 300 utilities, such as awk, perl, vi, make, and so on. Their library supports over 1500 Unix APIs, making it extremely complete and easing porting to the Windows environment. More information is available at http://www.mkssoftware.com/products/tk/ds_tkpdev.asp.



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