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From: mike@bria.UUCP (mike.stefanik)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix,comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: PS - What does -ksh mean?
Message-ID: <269@bria.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 91 17:59:30 GMT
References: <1991May24.200050.16644@uvm.edu>
Reply-To: uunet!bria!mike
Followup-To: comp.unix.aix
Organization: MGI Group International, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 19

In an article, moore@emily.uvm.edu (Bryan Moore) writes:
>What does the - sign mean in front of sh and ksh?

This means that it is a login shell.  Traditionally, the way that UNIX
shells "know" that they are login shells (thus, they execute /etc/profile
and ~/.profile, etc.) is they are invoked as such:

	execl("/bin/sh","-sh",NULL);

The first argument to execl() is the name of the image to execute, the
second argument is argv[0], and so on.  When you get a process status,
it'll show argv[0], which has the dash (which makes it easy to tell the
difference between the login shell and subshells)

-- 
Michael Stefanik, MGI Inc, Los Angeles | Opinions stated are never realistic
Title of the week: Systems Engineer    | UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
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If MS-DOS didn't exist, who would UNIX programmers have to make fun of?