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BASH 4.0 Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the tools-that-matter dept.

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."

5 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. looks like it still loses history by Froze · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    -- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
  2. Re:Circular what? by slim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What do you think was used to compile GCC?

  3. Re:This is excellent news by multisync · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps this year, Linux will be ready for the desktop.

    Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. It's just that certain users are not yet ready for Linux.

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    I don't care why you're posting AC
  4. Re:This is excellent news by morcego · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. It's just that certain users are not yet ready for Linux.

    You are too kind. In fact, most users are not ready to operate computers. At all.

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    morcego
  5. I hate [T]CSH by Khopesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!)

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