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BASH 4.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The widely used Bourne-Again Shell (BASH) version 4.0 is out. The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases, and introduces a bunch of new features. The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**' special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of POSIX non-compliance. Most of us will probably wait for the distros to test the new version and upgrade gradually, but you always have the option of grabbing the source and compiling it yourself. Enjoy."
Don't get me wrong, I really like bash, but the treatment of history is abysmal. The default behavior is to lose history due to a race condition when multiple bash sessions that are concurrently open are closed in arbitrary order.
IMNSHO, the default of any process should be to never lose data.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
The day Ruby or Python takes over from the boot grub loader for the initialization of init levels in Linux on start up is the day your statement makes sense. Until then, I think people with your attitude love one tool too much. If you don't understand BASH, you don't really understand Linux. I think OS start up is a serious script.
What do you think was used to compile GCC?
Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. It's just that certain users are not yet ready for Linux.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Solaris 9 (10 is *far* from universal, hell, even 8 is pretty common). HPUX. Tru64. That's three off the top of my head.
People have ported GNU to them but you just can't rely things like bash being there - you have to be able to work with the out of the box environment.
Not available? Not many. Not installed as standard? *BSD, Solaris, AIX, and any Linux that isn't GNU/Linux. POSIX mandates the existence of /bin/sh and a set of commands it must understand. Any POSIX system will have this, and it's possible to write complex scripts using only these features. Using bash extensions means that you are writing a GNU shell script, not a portable shell script. This may be fine for you, but you've just added another dependency to your program.
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You are too kind. In fact, most users are not ready to operate computers. At all.
morcego
Out of the box? My guess is "almost all of them", at least where BASH 4 is concerned. Outside of the Linux community, BASH 4 will pretty much be stillborn. I expect close to zero adoption.
Why? GPL v3. The *BSD community is working hard to replace everything the FSF produces with BSD-licensed code because GPL v3 is so offensive to them. They're well on their way even in hard-to-fill spaces like compiler technology. With shells, they already have several viable replacements, so there's no point in continuing to drag along the licensing baggage that is BASH. They'll just include Zsh and pdksh instead and most people won't care. The folks who do can compile and build BASH themselves. I'd expect it to be rejected by many of the corporate-backed UNIX/Linux distros as well.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
One of my favorite bookmarks, Csh Programming is Considered Harmful, is very useful for shell scripting in Bourne, Csh, and Bash. Oh, and it's also a good reminder of why you should never write csh scripts.
In my experience, the only [t]csh users out there are those who used it back in the day before there were other options, or those who are so embedded in the C/C++ world that they thought it a good idea to use a C/C++ -styled shell. That's fine, use that shell. DON'T write scripts in it though. It's annoying. (More annoying: ln -s /bin/csh /bin/sh ... this breaks TONS of things as /bin/sh must be posix-compliant. Csh doesn't even want (or try) to do that!)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
You're an idiot.
The shell is my file manager, and my entire dev toolchain works from the shell. Shell scripting is better suited to linking together unix commands that pipe text between one another. I don't particularly want any scripting interpreters other than bash and awk to be _required_ on my systems. I like lua and javascript, some folk prefer perl, python or ruby but nobody is getting very far on a unix-like system without /bin/sh and the de-facto standard for that is bash.
Yes, I am complaining about the default behavior.
How about if we made the default for mv to delete blocks as they were copied and not wait to delete to original until a full copy was made. This would be 'good' (more efficient) most of the time and break in strange corner cases, losing the users data (not a good thing^TM).
The default behavior should *NOT lose data*. To do so is bad UI design.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
...MOST users.
To be fair, most users have trouble setting the clock on a VCR.
He has a garage, fixes cars. He LOVES people that don't think they need to operate their car. Some lovely person puts petrol in the company van, ah christmas come early! Oil light been on since "Oh I just ignore that as the car starts fine with it on", we will eat tonight!
The simple fact is that we got to know a lot of stuff and if we don't we pay other people a LOT of money for knowing their stuff. 175 euro for 15 minutes work unglogging a toilet because some female doesn't know you can't put femine hygiene products down the toilet.
50 euro to run a set of automated tools on your PC to clean it, total labor involved, inserting a USB stick, you got to bring the PC in, during quiet hours and pick it up yourself, no warranty.
My neighbour changed his the nature of his small construction firm, he no longer does projects for clients, he assists DIY'ers with theirs. To translate, he charges a FORTUNE to fix the mess they made and has their free labor to help out with simple but expensive to hire a pro for tasks.
Everytime somebody like you defends people not having to know the tools they use, somebody somewhere sees dollar signs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.