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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.
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.
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What do you think was used to compile GCC?
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!
Your mom?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Visual Studio 2008?
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.
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.
So they've finally perfected the Gnu-tron bomb!