When comparing eltclsh vs ksh, the Slant community recommends eltclsh for most people. In the question“What are the best Bash replacements?” eltclsh is ranked 11th while ksh is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose eltclsh is:
Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro A more consistent alternative to the POSIX shell
Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script.
Pro TclVFS
TclVFS allows you access files inside ZIP archives or on remote HTTP and FTP servers like you would local files. If you put "package require vfs::urltype; vfs::urltype::Mount http"
in your ~/.eltclshrc you can do things like "file copy http://example.com/file /tmp/file" (HTTPS is currently not supported by TclVFS.)
Pro It's a de facto standard
ksh comes from Bill Joy, in the days before Bash, and it's also native to Solaris so you should always write your scripts to support this shell.
Cons
Con Stability
eltclsh crashes on mismatched delimiters.