This is the Advanced Software Technology (AST) toolkit, originally developed and released as free software by AT&T Research. It includes many tools and libraries, such as KSH, NMAKE, SFIO, VMALLOC, and VCODEX. It also includes more efficient replacements for many of the POSIX tools. It was designed to be portable across many UNIX and UNIX-like systems and also works under UWIN on Microsoft Windows.

Compared to the official AT&T repository, this repository features the following improvements and new features:

• Restored compatibility with classic UNIX systems like UNIXWARE and early releases of Solaris.

• Ada language support, including automatic dependency scanning, installation of ALI files, and convenient operators like :ADA_LIBRARY: (GNAT-only at this time).
• New functionality to support contemporary releases of Mac OS X, including Xcode TBD files, Clang-specific preprocessor features like __has_include_next, and properly versioned ($VERSION.dylib) dynamic libraries.
• Enhanced build integrity. In addition to file modification times, NMAKE now tracks the file sizes of built objects for determining whether a rebuild is necessary.
• Recognizes Makefile.nmk and makefile.nmk as Nmakefiles. This should aid syntax-highlighting editors in selecting the proper Makefile dialect and complies with the 8.3 filename convention.

The AT&T source code within this package is licensed under the Eclipse Public License, version 2.0, without the GPL compatibility clause. Please consider supporting the addition of said clause.

Newly written source code within this repository is released under the terms of the MIT-0 license, which is compatible with both the EPL and the GPL. As there is no mechanism in place for copyright assignment for contributions to the AST, the permissiveness of MIT-0 licensing will hopefully facilitate any future re-licensing by AT&T.

The following platforms have been recently tested with the AST toolkit.

This software is used to build itself with NMAKE. After cloning this repository, cd to the top directory of it and run:

./bin/package make

For more information, run:

./bin/package help

After the completion of a successful build, binaries and supporting files may be found within the arch/platform directory.

Many of the packaged commands (including bin/package) self-document via the --man (for the UNIX manual page) and --html options.

If you were accustomed to the old AST packaging mechanism, on www.research.att.com, this repository is equivalent to downloading the INIT and ast-open packages and running ./bin/package read on them.

If you are using a packaging system like MacPorts, Homebrew, or Fink, you may need to adjust your path before compiling AST:

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin

if you encounter errors like the following:

Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
  "_iconv", referenced from:
      __ast_iconv_open in libast.a(iconv.o)

This is necessary because NMAKE is otherwise liable to link against incompatible third-party libraries such as GNU libiconv.

If you are only looking for the Korn Shell from the AST toolkit, please consider using the ksh93 fork maintained by Martijn Dekker instead. Unfortunately, I (@lkujaw) cannot devote the time that the AST (including the Korn Shell) deserves.

Help in the following areas would be greatly appreciated:

• Porting features and fixes from the AST beta releases made through 2016. Some stability issues in these releases were never addressed, so caution is warranted.
• Porting applicable fixes made to Martijn Dekker's ksh93 fork. Adjustments will likely be necessary due to feature divergence (e.g., COSHELL support is continued here for NMAKE).
• Testing on other UNIX and UNIX-like systems, especially the BSDs.
• Adapting AST to work with Microsoft's Services for UNIX, Cygwin, and DJGPP. To the best of my knowledge, UWIN has never supported PC DOS nor has it been maintained for quite some time.