The biggest benefit of real ksh, to me, is that variables don't disappear in weird cases, such as: cat file |\ while read stuff do other stuff;

The biggest benefit of real ksh, to me, is that variables don't disappear in weird cases, such as: cat file |\ while read stuff do other stuff; set variable done In ksh93, variables set within the while loop stay around outside of it. Whereas bash will run the while loop in a forked sub process.