David Korn (computer Scientist)

David Korn (computer Scientist)

David Korn is an American UNIX programmer, who is probably best known for creating the Korn shell (ksh), a command line interface/programming language. The Korn shell is a de facto standard for UNIX-like systems and many other environments.

David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic airfoils, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to problems he and his colleagues had with the most commonly used shells at the time, Bourne shell and C shell. Korn shell is backward-compatible with Bourne shell, but takes a lot of ideas from C shell, such as history viewing and vi-like command line editing.