commandliners

Via Slashdot I found out about bash version 4.0 being out.

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.

The new version fixes several bugs in the 3.x releases and introduces a bunch of new features. The most notable ones 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.

There are some user-visible incompatibilities between this version of Bash and previous widely-distributed versions, bash-2.05b and bash-3.2, so start updating your scripts ;-)