The new version of Bash 5.0 arrives with new features

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Bash (Bourne-Again shell) is a script type command line interpreter. This is the Unix shell that is part of the GNU project it is based on the Bourne shell (bsh or simply sh in many versions of UNIX).

Bash brings many improvements, including the Korn shell (ksh) and the C shell (csh). Bash is free software released under the GPL license.

This is the default interpreter on many free Unix systems, especially GNU / Linux systems. It is also the default shell of Mac OS X. The Cygwin project brought it to Windows for the first time and in Windows 10 it is an operating system option.

Bash is a full implementation of the POSIX shell specification, but with interactive command line editing and job control on architectures that support it, csh functions, and many other features.

New version of Bash

A few days ago, the team in charge of Bash development announced the availability of the first public launch of Bash 5.0, the fifth major version of the Unix shell from the GNU project.

This version fixes several major bugs in bash-4.4 and introduces several new features.

In a message from the GNU Project mailing list, Chet Ramey, the Bash maintainer explains that the most important bug fixes are a revision of the resolution of the nameref variable and a series of overflow bugs discovered through fuzzing.

major developments

The most notable new features include several new shell variables such as BASH_ARGV0, EPOCHSECONDS, and EPOCHREALTIME.

The last two are similar to get the number of seconds since Epoch Unix (Epoch Unix), the only difference is that EPOCHREALTIME is a floating point with a granularity of microseconds.

Note that the epoch represents the initial date from which operating systems measure time.

There is a newly defined config-top.h file in Bash 5.0, which allows the shell to use a static value for $ PATH.

This new version of Bash 5.0 it also has a new shell option that can enable and disable log sending to syslog at runtime.

For information, syslog is a protocol that defines an event log service for a computer system. It also refers to the name of the format that allows these exchanges.

bash-5.0

Between other major changes in this new Bash 5.0 release the option globasciirange is now enabled by default, but can be disabled by default at setup time.

POSIX mode can now enable the option shift_verbose and the option of history built-in in Bash 5.0 that you can now remove input ranges from history using - d start-end.

Other changes

There are some inconsistent changes between bash-4.4 and bash-5.0. According to Chet Ramey, changes in the way nameref variables are resolved mean that some uses of namerefs will behave differently, although they have tried to minimize compatibility issues.

In summary, Bash 5.0 contains several fixes compared to Bash 4.4, but also a number of new features and enhancements to better comply with the POSIX specifications. For complete information on bash 5.0, you can refer to their official release notes.

These new features and enhancements certainly allow Bash to be more mature than it already is.

Let's not forget that the shell list has recently been expanded with PowerShell Core, the open source edition of PowerShell that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

This project is still in full development, but we can expect it to grow rapidly, as Microsoft is giving the go-ahead to open source "at least for now."

How to get Bash 5.0 on Linux?

Moment It only remains to wait for this new version of Bash to be incorporated within the repositories of Linux distributions, since it is the best option.

If you want to know a little more and also those who want to get this new version now, you can visit the following link.


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