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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."
Still gay.
Perhaps this year, Linux will be ready for the desktop.
This is great, but I find the csh syntax easier to use from the command line (however unsafe it is to use in scripts). Will they add a csh compatability mode to bash?
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.
i'll wait for 4.2
This is GNU Bash, version 4.0. Bash is the GNU Project's Bourne
Again SHell, a complete implementation of the POSIX.2 shell spec,
but also with interactive command line editing, job control on
architectures that support it, csh-like features such as history
substitution and brace expansion, and a slew of other features.
For more information on the features of Bash that are new to this
type of shell, see the file `doc/bashref.texi'. There is also a
large Unix-style man page. The man page is the definitive description
of the shell's features.
See the file POSIX for a discussion of how the Bash defaults differ
from the POSIX.2 spec and a description of the Bash `posix mode'.
There are some user-visible incompatibilities between this version
of Bash and previous widely-distributed versions, bash-2.05b and
bash-3.2. For details, see the file COMPAT. The NEWS file tersely
lists features that are new in this release.
Bash is free software, distributed under the terms of the [GNU] General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
version 3 of the License (or any later version). For more information,
see the file COPYING.
A number of frequently-asked questions are answered in the file
`doc/FAQ'.
To compile Bash, try typing `./configure', then `make'. Bash
auto-configures the build process, so no further intervention
should be necessary. Bash builds with `gcc' by default if it is
available. If you want to use `cc' instead, type
CC=cc ./configure
if you are using a Bourne-style shell. If you are not, the following
may work:
env CC=cc ./configure
Read the file INSTALL in this directory for more information about how
to customize and control the build process. The file NOTES contains
platform-specific installation and configuration information.
If you are a csh user and wish to convert your csh aliases to Bash
aliases, you may wish to use the script `examples/misc/alias-conv.sh'
as a starting point. The script `examples/misc/cshtobash' is a
more ambitious script that attempts to do a more complete job.
Reporting Bugs
==============
Bug reports for bash should be sent to:
bug-bash@gnu.org
using the `bashbug' program that is built and installed at the same
time as bash.
The discussion list `bug-bash@gnu.org' often contains information
about new ports of Bash, or discussions of new features or behavior
changes that people would like. This mailing list is also available
as a usenet newsgroup: gnu.bash.bug.
When you send a bug report, please use the `bashbug' program that is
built at the same time as bash. If bash fails to build, try building
bashbug directly with `make bashbug'. If you cannot build `bashbug',
please send mail to bug-bash@gnu.org with the following information:
* the version number and release status of Bash (e.g., 2.05a-release)
* the machine and OS that it is running on (you may run
`bashversion -l' from the bash build directory for this information)
* a list of the compilation flags or the contents of `config.h', if
appropriate
* a description of the bug
* a recipe for recreating the bug reliably
* a fix for the bug if you have one!
The `bashbug' program includes much of this automatically.
If you would like to contact the Bash maintainers directly, send mail
to bash-maintainers@gnu.org.
While the Bash maintainers do not promise to fix all bugs, we would
like this shell to be the best that we can make it.
Enjoy!
So, I'm gonna grab the source to BASH and compile it using GCC under BASH? My brain hurts :).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Nobody will really care about the new features so long as "man woman" still does that vagina-less woman joke.
The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases
That's great, but they forgot to mention how many new bugs were introduced.
Tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker, but not of any interest for people writing serious scripts. Shell scripting was a big breakthrough 30 years ago, and it still has its uses. But the scripting community has moved on, and doesn't really care that Bash or Csh now have features that other scripting languages acquired decades ago.
Oh, good.
I'm sure someone likes case-sensitive filenames, but they annoy me way more often than I find them useful. Maybe this will reduce or eliminate one of my biggest problems with them.
So now I can make a BASH hash, sweet!
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Personally, I wouldn't install anything called BASH for the sole reason of protecting my computer from physical brutality that I do not perform personally.
If anyone's beating this thing with a baseball bat, it's gonna be me.
I've been using Zsh (the Z shell) for years, because it had better completion, and a richer bourne-shell and ksh-based programming language including also associative arrays and the co-process.
So it would appear that bash finally caught up. But zsh has continued to improve. I'll be sticking with zsh for now, until I see that bash really caught up.
Does anyone have any screenshots? I always hate that when they post some great new upgrade without any screenshots.
More
So you like to type in script, No forgiveness when a space is skipped, It doesn't matter, I'm hard up for cash. Thank goodness I have patience, for the love of BASH
With your production boxes, it's generally recommended that you wait for Bash 4.0 SP1 before deploying.
#DeleteChrome
If you want your scripts to be compatible with just about every Unix, you still need to stick with /bin/sh (yes, I know, it's a compatibility mode). If you don't, might as well use a better scripting language.
After bootstrapping the new compiler with the old compiler, you can then use your new compiler to compile the new compiler code.
If this bothers you, stay away from recursion!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Can someone post a link to a simple "What's New" doc? I'm not gonna go combing through the code to see if they've fixed my bug.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
The new major release fixes several remaining bugs in the 3.x releases, and introduces a bunch of bugs.
But is it snappier?
I do find having moderate lightweight programmability in a shell to be useful, for writing one-off things on the command line: things like doing some operation on file_X for X=01 to 99. But for anything more significant, I find myself always writing a Perl script or something.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe it's a weird way to go about it, but when I write my shell-script-like Perl scripts, I start them out similarly by just building on commands I've already typed, wrapped in system(). Slightly heavier-weight syntax, but not by much, and allows me to use all the rest of Perl, which makes some things easier.
It does provide a portability route if I want one: I can convert all the system("mv whatever") calls to use the proper Perl OS-abstraction libraries. But you don't have to start out with those.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Can I order DVD from bashmall.com ?
Bourne bourne bourne bourne again!
Of course I wouldn't wait for 4.2, as someone pointed out above, but rather I would stick to using 3.5, even though really they are only at 3.2.
it would be quite cool if they could set up at least something something resembling homepage.
you know, the thing with announcements, news, and, ooooh, release notes !
wiki probably would be too much to ask.
Rich
... certain users are not yet ready...
...MOST users.
And the only (partial) way out of this problem I know of is screen. It offers a way of not having to close a session but to disconnect from it and later connect. You still cannot use multiple session with one user and keep all history, but you i.e. can run your primary commands on you screen session and keep that one running all the time (and keep your important work). Working that way is also a nice way to keep focused. Need to keep your machine running, obviously.
I love BASH, and it's my primary shell, but other shells have some really cool features. ZSH can have status bars and some cool syntax for lazy people and FISH has built in syntax highlighting...
This WILL FINALLY be the year of the bash desktop!
Instead of rm -rf /, we can now just say
rm -f /**
Now that's an improvement!
æeee!
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.
I'm seeing release candidate versions of bash 4 in the SRPMS dir for Fedora testing. It should be easy to rebuild it on Fedora 10 and install it, but I'd like to know if it would break existing scripts.
Does anyone know if it has any backward compatibility issues?
Wow, that was fast!
I hope to god nobodies got a ** typo in an old script because that could be troublesome.
Even worse it could be simple enough to ** in error on the prompt.
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.
What's the point? It's worthless on my multi-touch screen. Only crusted headed, unbathed, girlfriendless uber geeks need to use the CLI. CLI's are so 1940's Get with the times you gezzers.
This is definitely the turning point; the Register just last week published an article indicating that the one thing stopping most users from migrating from Windows was the lack of support for the `**' special glob pattern.
Because the CLI ought to be a DRM-friendly environment!
Then again even Apple is busy removing DRM from iTMS, so perhaps the BSD folk are just wasting their time.
I was really hoping someone would post a picture of a half-rotated Compiz cube with a bash shell running transparently on it.
Just find any random old youtube video of people showing off Compiz. Superimpose an xterm with alpha=0%, and there's your transparent bash shell ;-)
a Windows or OSX dig would have been nice. ;-)
Quack, quack.
and has been for a long time now. It's an OS that caters to the high end of the technical skill bell curve.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
For whatever reason, I've been a diehard tcsh user for the last 15 years. It's clear that bash is the standard, and where all the development effort is going (at least relative to csh/tcsh).
Sometimes it feels like I'm the only tcsh user left.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
When did bash become the "de-facto standard"? I work at Sun, which has been in the Unix business for a couple decades. The most common interactive command line here is csh. (Bill Joy being the original head of software probably had something to do with that.) Most software developers here do prefer bash to csh, especially for scripting. But if somebody tried to tell them they couldn't use any other scripting language, they'd probably quit all at once. If you asked them what the de-facto standard was, I think they'd all say Perl. Even the ones that hate Perl.
Your religiousity about bash may work for you, but it wouldn't for most people. I'm a writer, not a developer, but I do need to write the odd small program now and then. The other day I wrote a 20-line Perl script that pulls a list of names off a web site, looks them up in an LDAP database, and saves retrieved user data in a text file. (The point is to synchronize a web site user access list that I maintain with one that I don't.) I'm sure I could do it as a shell script, but it would be a lot more complicated, and probably a bit less efficient.
linux should find some way to do "looping GUI" actions easily.....
linux is good for "farms" coz it's easy to do "looping" job
windoz is good for "dumbs" coz it's easy to point-n-click
so for "dumb farms" u need "looping GUI"....
Haha, I've done things like the mplayer example as
ls */ | sed 's/^\1$/mplayer \1*.mp3/' | sh
This is because I'm a noob that knows very few GNU commands, but enough to be hazardous.
I believe both recursive globbing "**" and coroutines are zsh features.
I'm glad they included this. I think it's fair to say that lack of recursive globbing support was pretty annoying in the past. Using a command composed with find composed with xargs was the previous alternative... and pretty over complicated compared to **.
In the past I'd switched to zsh, but moved back because most shell scripting information online is built around bash. This makes sticking with bash that much easier.
I am still waiting for a standard command line syntax for every command, standard command naming convention for commands, standard config file format in /etc, standard output, object piping... oh well, this just looks like powershell... damn! Is there a project trying to bring sanity to this mess?
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.
"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."
Translation: "Most of us would try it out if only it was easy to do so and we had the freedom to easily install and use Linux software, but we don't, because software installation standards have yet to be worked out and right now it's annoying as hell tracking down the dependencies manually and struggling through the compilation process. Instead, we'll rely on distro companies to give us access to software instead of being able to download and run like Mac and Windows users have the luxury of doing."
Yeah, I'm sure I'll hear the "if they want to try out BASH then they probably know how to compile already" argument, but a) that doesn't make it any less annoying, just because you like using the command line doesn't mean you hate convenience, and b) I'm speaking generally about the sever lack of Linux binaries in existence, and the complete lack of nice installation packages unless you get lucky and someone targeted your specific version of your specific distro.
Once Linux application installation becomes a snap, so any Linux users can easily share software, you will see a much greater proliferation of Linux programs out there, torrents etc, because it will actually be useful keeping archives of packages because they won't go obsolete in 6 months. Once users can easily share Linux programs, it will help make Linux adoption sore and Linux users who don't want to or don't know how to compile will finally be free of suckling on distro companies for their software milk.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
So is bash still the only shell getting pipes wrong.
In all other shells, the last part of the pipe is in the current process.
In bash, the first part of a pipe is, which is completely useless. If it's the last one, you can effectively modify variables and use them later.
e.g.:
ls | while read a
do
myls="$myls $a"
done
echo $myls
ok, it's a silly example but what would you expect happens by just quickly looking at the code. The echo shows the ls? Well not in bash, it just is empty!
But the bash people still ignore this bug, because in POSIX it is not clear which part of the pipe is in the current process. Well why don't they do it like all the others?
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
Just build the binary and install it as /bin/bash-4.0 or bash4, and you can use the new version, while your scripts don't break. If you want to start testing, try running some of your scripts under the new version. When you are more confident, you can symlink /bin/sh to your new bash4.
Many binaries use this type of protocol: gimp, gcc, and several others. It allows you to use multiple versions at once, if you wish. The default one is just a symbolic link from say gimp to gimp-2.4 -- Simple. Effective. Easy.
Great update.
For me, standards across all the *nix flavours is key so I probably won't use associated arrays in a shell script. Can't help but like them though.
Love that we finally have co-processes, hate that the syntax is completely non-standard.
Great to see bash updated though.
I did a wubi install of ubuntu on my laptop, and it installed and ran ok
and...
incredible - all these volunteers have produced a great OS/desktop that installed nearly flawlessly
or
so what - it is the same as windows, so why should I care ?
which is the problem: if windows is your target, who cares if you are equal or even slighlty better.
And stay away from any living cells! (think about it...)
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Are you specifically referring to the stagnant vi, or the class of vi editors (most notably vim)? If the former, yeah, sure whatever. If the latter, stop flaimbaiting. Just as csh users almost universally use tcsh (which is fine unless you're scripting), vi users almost universally use improved versions of vi like vim or elvis. The scripting argument is moot. You can find vim gurus that completely pwn emacs experts at efficient coding with their editor in the same way that you can find emacs gurus that wreck vim experts. It's pretty even, and there is no clear winner.
vim and emacs are in a league all their own, and others such as joe, kate, and bbedit aren't too far behind (some landing far closer than others). See Wikipedia's comparison of text editors for detail on what you're missing.
Gentoo stable requires bash for baselayout-1 /bin/sh for OpenRC
Gentoo unstable uses
I know - I wrote OpenRC and maintained baselayout-1 for a long time :)
For pure startup, busybox sh is the fastest, followed by dash followed by bash.
busybox is fastest purely because it doesn't fork as much due to the apps builtin. Plus the apps in question generally have much shorter code-paths due to many GNU extensions being stripped.
I didn't test zsh or pdksh for speed.
Its the bloody default shell. I can't stand it - why can't they use bash or just plain bourne shell FFS?
It's no fun if you get all rational about it. Nobody actually gives a flipping fuck what text editor you use. This argument is ritual by now and here for everyone's continued enjoyment.
When invoked as sh (i.e. in sh-compatibility mode), how does the following display?
$ echo "hello\n"
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
WHAT?!! If they aren't aware of their OS and its inner workings, then how are they going to edit their config files? It's not a true computer, or a true operating system, if you don't have to edit config files from the command line! This whole idea makes no sense to me!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Bash is GPL, which is not compatible with the BSD license. The standard response is to use zsh, which is more powerful than bash, insanely featureful, and BSD-licensed. I'm not a BSD user, but zsh is now my shell of choice. These days, the differences are so minor that it doesn't matter. The only big-deal feature in zsh but not bash that I can think of is RPROMPT and maybe the better completion. (See the screenshot of my power-tweaked zsh shell.)
I was under the impression the BSDs used zsh as the default shell. Maybe that's NetBSD?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
$ sudo apt-get install ipython
$ ipython -p pysh
You can make an alias or a (cue drum roll) shell script with that last command. The nice thing about pysh is that it has prevented me from learning to do anything complex in bash. I'm a slacker.
But... the future refused to change.
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