Re: pdksh package: Error when issuing a 'typeset -r' statement

["Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@mail.com>]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Matthew Pettis
<matthew.pettis@gmail.com> wrote:

>  I installed cygwin with the 'pdksh' package.  When I try to run issue
>  anything like the following:
>
>  $ typeset -r x=1
>
>  I get the error:
>
>  pdksh: x: is read only

This is a known 8+-year-old bug in pdksh, which as far as I can tell
is no longer being maintained by anyone (pointers to the contrary
welcome).  Why do you want pdksh?  Isn't Gen-u-wine ksh available for
Cygwin?

Anyway, it's setting the readonly flag (typeset -r) before
initializing the var instead of after.  Nothing to do with Cygwin -
you'll see the same error with pdksh 5.2.14 on NetBSD, OS X, Linux,
etc.  There's a patch that the Cygwin maintainer could apply to the
package, which fixes this and two other bugs:

http://www.cs.mun.ca/~michael/pdksh/files/pdksh-5.2.14-patches.1

There's also a patches.2; not sure what it fixes.  Note that the file
dates are bogus; the .1 patch dates back at least to November 2000.

>  P.S.  - I also have a weird prompt, as seen below... Haven't
>  researched that, as it is not critical, but if anyone knows offhand...
>
>  \[\e]0;\w\a\]\n\[\e[32m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0m\]\n$

That's just a heavily bash-ified prompt as it appears in ksh; guess
the Cygwin shell init files set that up in a "profile" somewhere
instead of a "bash_profile".  Tsk.   Easiest fix is to just set PS1 to
something more ksh-friendly in your own .profile.
-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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