The first thing I do when I log into a system, including Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, and Linux is exec ksh. Whatever for?
Consider this fact: the root shell on FreeBSD defaults to C shell; HP-UX defaults to the POSIX shell (without history); Linux almost everywhere defaults to bash. All of these shells are different in various ways. It is possible you might log into three separate machines and get three separate shells with three different ways of handling things.
Using Korn Shell means that all of these systems will be standardized on one shell, and every system will act the same when you interact with it. There will be no surprises – and surprises at the root command line often translate into disastrous errors.
On HP-UX, using ksh has the additional benefit of enabling history for root – although the security risks of this make this a dangerous benefit: best to erase history after you log out and to make sure that history is independent for every root shell.
What makes this possible is that the Korn Shell is available virtually everywhere, including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX – whereas other shells are not (which includes C shell, Bourne shell, and bash).
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