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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."
Perhaps this year, Linux will be ready for the desktop.
Already there. Just type 'csh' and bash will enter csh-compatibility mode. For scripting, just replace your #!/bin/bash with #!/bin/csh and away you go.
sig: sauer
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
Still gay.
Don't bash it dude.
So now I can make a BASH hash, sweet!
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
stay away from kernel.org then.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
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
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.
With your production boxes, it's generally recommended that you wait for Bash 4.0 SP1 before deploying.
#DeleteChrome
What do you think was used to compile GCC?
What the fuck are you talking about? In the real world, shell scripts are used all the time. Despite their failings relative to more complex languages like Python and Perl, shell scripts are very easy to generate from repeated manual invocations of command lines.
In other words, to scratch an itch with a Python script requires writing your command over again. With a shell script, you can build on the commands you've already typed. Shell scripting is the original RAD, and remains very useful today.
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?
ln -s /bin/false /bin/csh
99% of the functionality of csh, without the bugs!
Sup dawg, I heard you liked compiling, so I put a compiler in your compiler so you can compile while you compile.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Gentoo uses bash for their init scripts citing reasons of speed.
Yeah it does show.
i think you mean sh, /bin/sh is a symlink to bash in most all Linux systems, calling bash from the sh symlink: Man page ahead::
/etc/profile and ~/.profile, in that order. The --noprofile option may be used to
inhibit this behavior. When invoked as an interactive shell with the name sh, bash
looks for the variable ENV, expands its value if it is defined, and uses the
expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Since a shell invoked as
sh does not attempt to read and execute commands from any other startup files, the
--rcfile option has no effect. A non-interactive shell invoked with the name sh
does not attempt to read any other startup files. When invoked as sh, bash enters
posix mode after the startup files are read.
/bin/csh is usually a symlink to /bin/tcsh in most all Linux systems.
If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup behavior of his- torical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX stan- dard as well. When invoked as an interactive login shell, or a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first attempts to read and execute commands from
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Broken link. Try this: Reflections on Trusting Trust. It's the most frightening security paper of the last 30 years.
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.
Your mom?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Weird, because Debian moving away from bash to dash for exactly the same reasons.
http://www.nabble.com/Making-init-scripts-use-dash-td4458217.html
Visual Studio 2008?
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.
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.
Are you smoking something? This is a GNU project. The "web page" is actually a facade to appease the unenlightened. Here is a Web 1.0 concept mapping for you:
news page -> "announce" mailing list
wiki -> "user" mailing list, documentation
developer forum -> "dev" mailing list
release notes -> in the tarball!
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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.
EGCS, duh.
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?
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.
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.
Use i.e. as a stand-in for "that is."
I prefer to use Firefox.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
...MOST users.
To be fair, most users have trouble setting the clock on a VCR.
Or do "set -o inc_append_history" in zsh.
(I'm not sure if the option is case sensitive. It may need to be in CAPS, the lameness filter made me change it)
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
WHOOOSH
I was following this discussion of bash, sh, csh and tcsh perfectly well, but now I'm lost. What shell are you talking about?
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.