1 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-alpha,
2 and the previous version, bash-4.1-release.
6 a. Fixed a bug in the parser when processing alias expansions containing
9 b. Fixed a memory leak in associative array expansion.
11 c. Fixed a bug that caused quoted here-strings to be requoted when printed.
13 d. Fixed a bug in arithmetic expansion that caused the index in an array
14 expansion to be evaluated twice under certain circumstances.
16 e. Fixed several bugs with the expansion and display of variables that have
17 been given attributes but not values and are technically unset.
19 f. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when using filename completion that
20 expands to a filename containing a globbing character.
22 g. Fixed a bug that caused assignment statements preceding a special builtin
23 when running in Posix mode to not persist after the builtin completed
24 when the special builtin was executed in a shell function without any
27 h. Fixed a bug that caused a command to remain in the hash table even after
28 `hash command' did not find anything if there was already an existing
31 i. Fixed several bugs caused by executing unsafe functions from a signal
32 handler in the cases where a signal handler is executed immediately
33 rather than setting a flag for later execution.
35 j. Fixed a bug that caused some internal flag variables to be set
36 incorrectly if `read -t' timed out.
38 k. Fixed a Posix compatibility issue by making sure that a backslash escaping
39 a `}' within a double-quoted ${...} parameter expansion is removed as part
40 of the parameter expansion.
42 l. Fixed a bug that caused execution of a trap to overwrite PIPESTATUS.
44 m. Fixed a bug that caused here documents to not be displayed correctly
45 when attached to commands inside compound commands.
47 n. Fixed a bug that caused the printf builtin to use the wrong precision
48 when using the `*' modifier.
50 o. Fixed a bug that caused an arriving SIGCHLD to interrupt output functions
51 like those invoked by echo or printf.
53 p. Changed to use a more robust mechanism than eaccess(2) when test is
54 checking filenames for execution permission.
56 q. Fixed a bug that caused spurious semicolons to be added into the command
57 history in certain cases.
59 r. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to free non-allocated memory when
60 unsetting element 0 of an associative array after it was assigned
63 s. Fixed a bug that could cause the shell to dump core if using the `v'
64 vi editing command on a multi-line command.
66 t. Fixed a bug that left FIFOs opened by process substitutions open long
67 enough to potentially cause file descriptor exhaustion when running a
68 shell function or shell builtin.
70 u. Fixed a bug that caused the history expansion functions to not recognize
71 process substitution or extended glob patterns as single words.
73 v. Fixed a bug that caused restricted shells to set a restricted command's
74 exit status incorrectly.
76 w. Fixed a bug that caused bash to ignore the wrong set of filenames when
77 completing a command using the `complete-filename' readline command.
79 x. Fixed a bug that caused a -PID argument following a -s sig or -n sig to
80 not be interpreted as a signal specification.
82 y. Changed posix-mode behavior of a parse error in a `.' script or `eval'
83 command to exit the shell under Posix-specified conditions. Previous
84 versions printed a warning.
86 z. Fixed a bug in \W prompt expansion that resulted in incorrect expansion
87 in the event of overlapping strings.
89 aa. Fixed a bug that caused the := parameter expansion operator to return the
90 wrong value as the result of the expansion.
92 bb. When in Posix mode, a single quote is not treated specially in a
93 double-quoted ${...} expansion, unless the expansion operator is
94 # or % or the non-Posix `//', `^', and `,'. In particular, it does
95 not define a new quoting context. This is from Posix interpretation 221.
97 cc. Fixed a bug that inadvertently allowed program names containing slashes
98 to be entered into the command hash table.
100 dd. Fixed a bug that caused the select builtin to incorrectly compute the
101 display width of the arguments in the presence of multibyte characters.
103 ee. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not change the xtrace file descriptor if
104 BASH_XTRACEFD was found in the shell environment at startup.
106 ff. Fixed a memory leak in the pattern removal parameter expansion.
108 gg. Fixed a bug that caused SIGINT to fail to interrupt a nested loop if the
109 loop was in a pipeline.
111 hh. Fixed a problem in $(...) parsing that caused the parser to add an extra
112 space to a here-document delimiter if the first word contained a `/'.
114 ii. Fixed a bug that caused functions defined with the `function' reserved
115 word to require braces around the function body.
117 jj. Fixed a bug that caused bash to dump core when a variable expansion being
118 used as an array subscript failed.
120 kk. Fixed a bug that caused bash to dump core if the case-modification
121 expansions were used on a variable with a null value.
123 ll. Fixed a bug that caused partially-quoted strings to be split incorrectly
124 if a variable with a null value was expanded within double quotes.
126 mm. The pattern substitution word expansion has been sped up dramatically
127 when running in a locale with multibyte characters.
129 nn. Fixed a bug that caused history -a to not write the correct lines to
130 the history file if all the new lines in the history list were added
131 since the last time the history file was read or written.
133 oo. Fixed a bug that caused completion of a word with an unclosed `` command
134 substitution to set the prompt incorrectly.
136 pp. Fixed a bug that caused extended globbing patterns in $HISTIGNORE or
137 $GLOBIGNORE to be incorrectly scanned.
139 qq. Fixed a bug caused by closing file descriptors 3-20 on shell startup. The
140 shell now sets them to close-on-exec.
142 rr. Fixed a bug that caused the exit status of `exec file' to be set incorrectly
143 if `file' was a directory.
145 ss. Fixed a bug in the `.' builtin to make a non-interactive posix-mode shell
146 exit if the file argument to `.' is not found. Prefixing exec with
147 `command' makes the shell not exit. Posix requires this behavior.
149 tt. Fixed a bug that caused `sh -c 'command exec; exit 1' to hang.
151 uu. Fixed a bug in $(...) command substitution parsing that caused the shell
152 to treat backslash-newline incorrectly when parsing a comment.
154 vv. Fixed bug that caused brace expansion sequence generation to misbehave
155 when supplied integers greater than 2**31 - 1.
157 ww. Fixed a bug that caused failure to save file descriptors for redirections
158 to corrupt shell file descriptors.
160 xx. Fixed a bug that caused bash-forward-shellword to not correctly handle
163 2. Changes to Readline
165 a. Fixed a bug that caused the unconverted filename to be added to the list of
166 completions when the application specified filename conversion functions.
168 b. Fixed a bug that caused the wrong filename to be passed to opendir when the
169 application has specified a filename dequoting function.
171 c. Fixed a bug when repeating a character search in vi mode in the case where
172 there was no search to repeat.
174 d. When show-all-if-ambiguous is set, the completion routines no longer insert
175 a common match prefix that is shorter than the text being completed.
177 e. The full set of vi editing commands may now be used in callback mode.
179 f. Fixed a bug that caused readline to not update its idea of the terminal
180 dimensions while running in `no-echo' mode.
182 h. Fixed a bug that caused readline to dump core if an application called
183 rl_prep_terminal without setting rl_instream.
185 i. Fixed a bug that caused meta-prefixed characters bound to incremental
186 search forward or backward to not be recognized if they were typed
189 j. The incremental search code treats key sequences that map to the same
190 functions as (default) ^G, ^W, and ^Y as equivalent to those characters.
192 k. Fixed a bug in menu-complete that caused it to misbehave with large
195 l. Fixed a bug that caused vi-mode yank-last-arg to ring the bell when invoked
196 at the end of the line.
198 3. New Features in Bash
200 a. `exec -a foo' now sets $0 to `foo' in an executable shell script without a
203 b. Subshells begun to execute command substitutions or run shell functions or
204 builtins in subshells do not reset trap strings until a new trap is
205 specified. This allows $(trap) to display the caller's traps and the
206 trap strings to persist until a new trap is set.
208 c. `trap -p' will now show signals ignored at shell startup, though their
209 disposition still cannot be modified.
211 d. $'...', echo, and printf understand \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX escape sequences.
213 e. declare/typeset has a new `-g' option, which creates variables in the
214 global scope even when run in a shell function.
216 f. test/[/[[ have a new -v variable unary operator, which returns success if
217 `variable' has been set.
219 g. Posix parsing changes to allow `! time command' and multiple consecutive
220 instances of `!' (which toggle) and `time' (which have no cumulative
223 h. Posix change to allow `time' as a command by itself to print the elapsed
224 user, system, and real times for the shell and its children.
226 j. $((...)) is always parsed as an arithmetic expansion first, instead of as
227 a potential nested command substitution, as Posix requires.
229 k. A new FUNCNEST variable to allow the user to control the maximum shell
230 function nesting (recursive execution) level.
232 l. The mapfile builtin now supplies a third argument to the callback command:
233 the line about to be assigned to the supplied array index.
235 m. The printf builtin has a new %(fmt)T specifier, which allows time values
236 to use strftime-like formatting.
238 n. There is a new `compat41' shell option.
240 o. The cd builtin has a new Posix-mandated `-e' option.
242 p. Negative subscripts to indexed arrays, previously errors, now are treated
243 as offsets from the maximum assigned index + 1.
245 q. Negative length specifications in the ${var:offset:length} expansion,
246 previously errors, are now treated as offsets from the end of the variable.
248 r. Parsing change to allow `time -p --'.
250 s. Posix-mode parsing change to not recognize `time' as a keyword if the
251 following token begins with a `-'. This means no more Posix-mode
252 `time -p'. Posix interpretation 267.
254 t. There is a new `lastpipe' shell option that runs the last command of a
255 pipeline in the current shell context. The lastpipe option has no
256 effect if job control is enabled.
258 u. History expansion no longer expands the `$!' variable expansion.
260 v. Posix mode shells no longer exit if a variable assignment error occurs
261 with an assignment preceding a command that is not a special builtin.
263 w. Non-interactive mode shells exit if -u is enabled an an attempt is made
264 to use an unset variable with the % or # expansions, the `//', `^', or
265 `,' expansions, or the parameter length expansion.
267 x. Posix-mode shells use the argument passed to `.' as-is if a $PATH search
268 fails, effectively searching the current directory. Posix-2008 change.
270 4. New Features in Readline
272 a. The history library does not try to write the history filename in the
273 current directory if $HOME is unset. This closes a potential security
274 problem if the application does not specify a history filename.
276 b. New bindable variable `completion-display-width' to set the number of
277 columns used when displaying completions.
279 c. New bindable variable `completion-case-map' to cause case-insensitive
280 completion to treat `-' and `_' as identical.
282 d. There are new bindable vi-mode command names to avoid readline's case-
283 insensitive matching not allowing them to be bound separately.
285 e. New bindable variable `menu-complete-display-prefix' causes the menu
286 completion code to display the common prefix of the possible completions
287 before cycling through the list, instead of after.
289 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
290 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-rc,
291 and the previous version, bash-4.1-beta.
295 a. Fixed a bug that caused printf to not return a partial value when it
296 encountered an error while converting an integer argument.
298 b. Fixed a bug that caused setting one of the compatNN options to not
301 c. The (undocumented) --wordexp option is no longer included by default.
303 d. Fixed a bug in conditional command execution that caused it to not
304 correctly ignore the exit status under certain circumstances.
306 e. Added a configure-time check for correctly-working asprintf/snprintf.
308 f. Fixed some problems with line number calculation and display when sourcing
309 a file in an interactive shell.
311 g. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when using `declare -A foo=bar'.
313 h. Fixed a bug that caused an off-by-one error when calculating the directories
314 to display with the PROMPT_DIRTRIM option.
316 2. Changes to Readline
318 a. Fixed a bug that caused applications using the callback interface to not
319 react to SIGINT (or other signals) until another character arrived.
321 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
322 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-beta,
323 and the previous version, bash-4.1-alpha.
327 a. Fixed a bug in mapfile that caused the shell to crash if it was passed the
328 name of an associative array.
330 b. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to incorrectly split case patterns if
331 they contained characters in $IFS.
333 c. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to set $? to the wrong value when using
334 a construct ending with a variable assignment with set -x enabled and PS4
335 containing a command substitution.
337 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to read commands incorrectly if an
338 expansion error occurred under certain conditions in a user-specified
341 e. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to set $? incorrectly if a parse error
342 occurred in an evaluation context ("eval", trap command, dot script, etc.)
344 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt command substitution
345 completion within a single-quoted string.
347 g. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to insert an extra single quote during
350 h. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash if invoked with the environment
351 variable EMACS having a null value.
353 i. Fixed a bug that caused bash to incorrectly report the presence of new
354 mail in a `maildir' environment.
356 j. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not recognize a here-document ending
357 delimiter inside a command substitution.
359 k. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when a a dynamic array variable
360 was assigned a scalar value.
362 2. Changes to Readline
364 3. New Features in Bash
366 a. The mapfile/readarray builtin no longer stores the commands it invokes via
367 callbacks in the history list.
369 b. There is a new `compat40' shopt option.
371 c. The < and > operators to [[ do string comparisons using the current locale
372 only if the compatibility level is greater than 40 (set to 41 by default).
374 4. New Features in Readline
376 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
377 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-alpha,
378 and the previous version, bash-4.0-release.
382 a. Fixed bugs in the parser involving new parsing of the commands contained
383 in command substitution when the substitution is read.
385 b. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing programmable
386 completion using a shell function.
388 c. Fixed a bug in `mapfile' that caused it to invoke callbacks at the wrong
391 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when listing jobs in the
394 e. Fixed several bugs encountered when reading subscripts in associative
395 array assignments and expansions.
397 f. Fixed a bug that under some circumstances caused an associative array to
398 be converted to an indexed array.
400 g. Fixed a bug that caused syntax errors and SIGINT interrupts to not set
403 h. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to remove FIFOs associated with process
404 substitution inside shell functions.
406 i. Fixed a bug that caused terminal attributes to not be reset when the
407 `read' builtin timed out.
409 j. Fixed a bug in brace expansion that caused unwanted zero padding of the
412 k. Fixed a bug that prevented the |& construct from working as intended when
413 used with a simple command with additional redirections.
415 l. Fixed a bug with the case statment ;& terminator that caused the shell to
416 dereference a NULL pointer.
418 m. Fixed a bug that caused assignment statements or redirections preceding
419 a simple command name to inhibit alias expansion.
421 n. Fixed the behavior of `set -u' to conform to the latest Posix interpretation:
422 every expansion of an unset variable except $@ and $* will cause the
425 o. Fixed a bug that caused double-quoted expansions of $* inside word
426 expansions like ${x#$*} to not expand properly when $IFS is empty.
428 p. Fixed a bug that caused traps to set $LINENO to the wrong value when they
431 q. Fixed a bug that caused off-by-one errors when computing history lines in
434 r. Fixed a bug that caused some terminating signals to not exit the shell
435 quickly enough, forcing the kernel to send the signal (e.g., SIGSEGV)
438 s. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt to add empty lines to the
439 history list when reading here documents.
441 t. Made some internal changes that dramatically speeds up sequential indexed
444 u. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to write past the end of a string when
445 completing a double-quoted string ending in a backslash.
447 v. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to replace too many characters when a
448 pattern match was null in a ${foo//bar} expansion.
450 w. Fixed bugs in the expansion of ** that caused duplicate directory names
451 and the contents of the current directory to be omitted.
453 x. Fixed a bug that caused $? to not be set correctly when referencing an
454 unset variable with set -u and set -e enabled.
456 y. Fixed a bug caused by executing an external program from the DEBUG trap
457 while a pipeline was running. The effect was to disturb the pipeline
458 state, occasionally causing it to hang.
460 z. Fixed a bug that caused the ** glob expansion to dump core if it
461 encountered an unsearchable directory.
463 aa. Fixed a bug that caused `command -v' and `command -V' to not honor the
464 path set by the -p option.
466 bb. Fixed a bug that caused brace expansion to take place too soon in some
467 compound array assignments.
469 cc. Fixed a bug that caused programmable completion functions' changes to
470 READLINE_POINT to not be reflected back to readline.
472 dd. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core if a trap was executed
473 during a shell assignment statement.
475 ee. Fixed an off-by-one error when computing the number of positional
476 parameters for the ${@:0:n} expansion.
478 ff. Fixed a problem with setting COMP_CWORD for programmable completion
479 functions that could leave it set to -1.
481 gg. Fixed a bug that caused the ERR trap to be triggered in some cases where
482 `set -e' would not have caused the shell to exit.
484 hh. Fixed a bug that caused changes made by `compopt' to not persist past the
485 completion function in which compopt was executed.
487 ii. Fixed a bug that caused the list of hostname completions to not be cleared
488 when HOSTNAME was unset.
490 jj. Fixed a bug that caused variable expansion in here documents to look in
491 any temporary environment.
493 kk. Bash and readline can now convert file names between precomposed and
494 decomposed Unicode on Mac OS X ("keyboard" and file system forms,
495 respectively). This affects filename completion (using new
496 rl_filename_rewrite_hook), globbing, and readline redisplay.
498 ll. The ERR and EXIT traps now see a non-zero value for $? when a parser
499 error after set -e has been enabled causes the shell to exit.
501 mm. Fixed a bug that in brace expansion that caused zero-prefixed terms to
502 not contain the correct number of digits.
504 nn. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to free non-allocated memory when
505 unsetting an associative array which had had a value implicitly assigned
508 oo. Fixed a memory leak in the ${!prefix@} expansion.
510 pp. Fixed a bug that caused printf to not correctly report all write errors.
512 qq. Fixed a bug that caused single and double quotes to act as delimiters
513 when splitting a command line into words for programmable completion.
515 rr. Fixed a bug that caused ** globbing that caused **/path/* to match every
516 directory, not just those matching `path'.
518 ss. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when running `help' without
519 arguments if the terminal width was fewer than 7 characters.
521 2. Changes to Readline
523 a. The SIGWINCH signal handler now avoids calling the redisplay code if
524 one arrives while in the middle of redisplay.
526 b. Changes to the timeout code to make sure that timeout values greater
527 than one second are handled better.
529 c. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code that was triggered by a prompt
530 containing invisible characters exactly the width of the screen.
532 d. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code encountered when running in horizontal
535 e. Fixed a bug that prevented menu completion from properly completing
538 f. Fixed a redisplay bug caused by a multibyte character causing a line to
541 g. Fixed a bug that caused key sequences of two characters to not be
542 recognized when a longer sequence identical in the first two characters
545 h. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to be attempted on $'...'
546 single-quoted strings.
548 i. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect redisplay when the prompt contained
549 multibyte characters in an `invisible' sequence bracketed by \[ and
552 j. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to short-circuit after
553 encountering a multibyte character.
555 3. New Features in Bash
557 a. Here-documents within $(...) command substitutions may once more be
558 delimited by the closing right paren, instead of requiring a newline.
560 b. Bash's file status checks (executable, readable, etc.) now take file
561 system ACLs into account on file systems that support them.
563 c. Bash now passes environment variables with names that are not valid
564 shell variable names through into the environment passed to child
567 d. The `execute-unix-command' readline function now attempts to clear and
568 reuse the current line rather than move to a new one after the command
571 e. `printf -v' can now assign values to array indices.
573 f. New `complete -E' and `compopt -E' options that work on the "empty"
574 completion: completion attempted on an empty command line.
576 g. New complete/compgen/compopt -D option to define a `default' completion:
577 a completion to be invoked on command for which no completion has been
578 defined. If this function returns 124, programmable completion is
579 attempted again, allowing a user to dynamically build a set of completions
580 as completion is attempted by having the default completion function
581 install individual completion functions each time it is invoked.
583 h. When displaying associative arrays, subscripts are now quoted.
585 i. Changes to dabbrev-expand to make it more `emacs-like': no space appended
586 after matches, completions are not sorted, and most recent history entries
589 j. The [[ and (( commands are now subject to the setting of `set -e' and the
592 k. The source/. builtin now removes NUL bytes from the file before attempting
595 l. There is a new configuration option (in config-top.h) that forces bash to
596 forward all history entries to syslog.
598 m. A new variable $BASHOPTS to export shell options settable using `shopt' to
601 n. There is a new confgure option that forces the extglob option to be
604 o. New variable $BASH_XTRACEFD; when set to an integer bash will write xtrace
605 output to that file descriptor.
607 p. If the optional left-hand-side of a redirection is of the form {var}, the
608 shell assigns the file descriptor used to $var or uses $var as the file
609 descriptor to move or close, depending on the redirection operator.
611 q. The < and > operators to the [[ conditional command now do string
612 comparison according to the current locale.
614 r. Programmable completion now uses the completion for `b' instead of `a'
615 when completion is attempted on a line like: a $(b c.
617 s. Force extglob on temporarily when parsing the pattern argument to
618 the == and != operators to the [[ command, for compatibility.
620 t. Changed the behavior of interrupting the wait builtin when a SIGCHLD is
621 received and a trap on SIGCHLD is set to be Posix-mode only.
623 u. The read builtin has a new `-N nchars' option, which reads exactly NCHARS
624 characters, ignoring delimiters like newline.
626 4. New Features in Readline
628 a. New bindable function: menu-complete-backward.
630 b. In the vi insertion keymap, C-n is now bound to menu-complete by default,
631 and C-p to menu-complete-backward.
633 c. When in vi command mode, repeatedly hitting ESC now does nothing, even
634 when ESC introduces a bound key sequence. This is closer to how
635 historical vi behaves.
637 d. New bindable function: skip-csi-sequence. Can be used as a default to
638 consume key sequences generated by keys like Home and End without having
641 e. New application-settable function: rl_filename_rewrite_hook. Can be used
642 to rewite or modify filenames read from the file system before they are
643 compared to the word to be completed.
645 f. New bindable variable: skip-completed-text, active when completing in the
646 middle of a word. If enabled, it means that characters in the completion
647 that match characters in the remainder of the word are "skipped" rather
648 than inserted into the line.
650 g. The pre-readline-6.0 version of menu completion is available as
651 "old-menu-complete" for users who do not like the readline-6.0 version.
653 h. New bindable variable: echo-control-characters. If enabled, and the
654 tty ECHOCTL bit is set, controls the echoing of characters corresponding
655 to keyboard-generated signals.
657 i. New bindable variable: enable-meta-key. Controls whether or not readline
658 sends the smm/rmm sequences if the terminal indicates it has a meta key
659 that enables eight-bit characters.
661 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
662 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-release,
663 and the previous version, bash-4.0-rc1.
667 a. Changed the message printed when setlocale(3) fails to only include the
668 strerror error text if the call changes errno.
670 b. Changed trap command execution to reset the line number before running a
671 trap (except DEBUG and RETURN traps).
673 c. Fixed behavior of case-modifiying word expansions to not work on
674 individual words within a variable's value.
676 d. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not be interruptible when run in an
679 e. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not run callbacks for the first line
682 f. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not honor EOF typed in an interactive
685 g. Fixed the coprocess reaping code to not run straight from a signal handler.
687 h. Fixed a bug that caused printf -b to ignore the first % conversion specifier
688 in the format string on 64-bit systems.
690 i. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect word splitting when `:', `=', or `~'
693 j. Fixed a bug that caused data corruption in the programmable completion code
694 when a shell function called from a completion aborted execution.
696 k. Fixed a bug that caused the CPU usage reported by the `time' builtin to be
699 l. Changed behavior of shell when -e option is in effect to reflect consensus
700 of Posix shell standardization working group.
702 m. Fixed a bug introduced in bash-4.0-alpha that caused redirections to not
703 be displayed by `type' or `declare' when appearing in functions under
704 certain circumstances.
706 2. Changes to Readline
708 a. Fixed a bug that caused !(...) extended glob patterns to inhibit later
711 b. Reworked the signal handling to avoid calling disallowed functions from a
714 3. New Features in Bash
716 a. `readarray' is now a synonym for `mapfile'.
717 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
718 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-rc1,
719 and the previous version, bash-4.0-beta2.
723 a. Fixed a bug that caused parsing errors when a $()-style command
724 substitution was follwed immediately by a quoted newline.
726 b. Fixed a bug that caused extended shell globbing patterns beginning with
727 `*(' to not work when used with pattern substitution word expansions.
729 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
730 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-beta2,
731 and the previous version, bash-4.0-beta.
735 a. Fixed a bug that caused failed word expansions to set $? but not
738 b. Changed filename completion to quote the tilde in a filename with a
739 leading tilde that exists in the current directory.
741 c. Fixed a bug that caused a file descriptor leak when performing
742 redirections attached to a compound command.
744 d. Fixed a bug that caused expansions of $@ and $* to not exit the shell if
745 the -u option was enabled and there were no posititional parameters.
747 e. Fixed a bug that resulted in bash not terminating immediately if a
748 terminating signal was received while performing output.
750 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash after creating 256 process
751 substitutions during word completion.
753 2. Changes to Readline
755 a. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
756 characters and numeric arguments to a command in a multibyte locale.
758 b. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
759 characters spanning more than two physical screen lines.
761 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
762 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-beta,
763 and the previous version, bash-4.0-alpha.
767 a. Fixed a typo that caused a variable to be used before initialization
768 while parsing Posix-style command substitutions.
770 b. Fixed a bug that caused stray ^? when the expansion of a parameter used
771 as part of a pattern removal expansion is empty, but part of a non-
774 c. Fixed a bug that could cause strings not converted to numbers by strtol
775 to be treated as if the conversion had been successful.
777 d. The `return' builtin now accepts no options and requires a `--' before
778 a negative return value, as Posix requires.
780 e. Fixed a bug that caused local variables to be created with the empty
781 string for a value rather than no value.
783 f. Changed behavior so the shell now acts as if it received an interrupt
784 when a pipeline is killed by SIGINT while executing a list.
786 g. Fixed a bug that caused `declare var' and `typeset var' to initialize
787 `var' to the empty string.
789 h. Changed `bind' builtin to print a warning but proceed if invoked when
790 line editing is not active.
792 i. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to exit when the `errexit' option is
793 set and a command in a pipeline returns a non-zero exit status.
795 j. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not run the exit trap in a command
796 run with `bash -c' under some circumstances.
798 k. Fixed a bug that caused parser errors to occasionally not set $? when
799 running commands with `eval'.
801 l. Fixed a bug that caused stray control characters when evaluating compound
802 array assignments containing $'\x7f' escapes.
804 m. Fixed a bug that caused redirections involving file descriptor 10 as the
805 target to behave incorrectly.
807 n. Fixed a bug that could cause memory to be freed multiple times when
808 assigning to COMP_WORDBREAKS.
810 o. Fixed a bug that could cause NULL pointer dereferences when COMP_WORDBREAKS
813 2. Changes to Readline
815 3. New Features in Bash
817 a. A value of 0 for the -t option to `read' now returns success if there is
818 input available to be read from the specified file descriptor.
820 b. CDPATH and GLOBIGNORE are ignored when the shell is running in privileged
823 c. New bindable readline functions shell-forward-word and shell-backward-word,
824 which move forward and backward words delimited by shell metacharacters
825 and honor shell quoting.
827 d. New bindable readline functions shell-backward-kill-word and shell-kill-word
828 which kill words backward and forward, but use the same word boundaries
829 as shell-forward-word and shell-backward-word.
831 4. New Features in Readline
833 a. If the kernel supports it, readline displays special characters
834 corresponding to a keyboard-generated signal when the signal is received.
836 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
837 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-alpha,
838 and the previous version, bash-3.2-release.
842 a. Fixed several bugs in old-style `` command substitution parsing, including
843 comment parsing and quoted string handling.
845 b. Fixed problems parsing arguments to the [[ command's =~ regular expression
846 matching operator: metacharacter and whitespace parsing.
848 c. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to inappropriately reuse high-numbered
849 file descriptors it used internally.
851 d. Fixed a bug in pattern replacement word expansions that caused a `/' as
852 the first character of an expanded pattern to be mistaken for a global
853 replacement specifier.
855 e. Fixed several problems with the asprintf and snprintf replacement functions
856 that caused hangs and crashes.
858 f. Fixed a bug in the calculation of the current and previous job that caused
859 it to refer to incorrect jobs.
861 g. Fixed a bug in the check for the validity of a hashed command pathname that
862 caused unnecessary hash table deletions and additions.
864 h. Fixed a bug that caused child processes to inherit the wrong value for $!.
866 i. Fixed a bug that caused `.' to fail to read and execute commands from non-
867 regular files such as devices or named pipes.
869 j. Fixed a bug in printf formatting for the %x and %X expansions that occurred
872 k. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when creating temporary files if
873 $TMPDIR named a non-writable directory.
875 l. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to ignore $TMPDIR when creating temporary
876 files under some circumstances.
878 m. Fixed a bug that caused named pipes created by process substitution to not
881 n. Fixed a bug that caused HISTTIMEFORMAT to not be honored when it appeared
882 in the initial shell environment.
884 o. Fixed several bugs in the expansion of $* and $@ (quoted and unquoted)
885 when IFS is null or contains non-whitespace characters; the same changes
886 apply to arrays subscripted with * or @.
888 p. Fixed several problems with pattern substitution expansions on the
889 positional parameters and arrays subscripted with * or @ that occurred
890 when $IFS was set to the empty string.
892 q. Made a change to the default locale initialization code that should
893 result in better behavior from the locale-aware library functions.
895 r. Fixed a bug that caused compacting the jobs list to drop jobs.
897 s. Fixed a bug that caused jumps back to the top-level processing loop from
898 a builtin command to leave the shell in an inconsistent state.
900 t. Fixed a bug that caused characters that would be escaped internally to be
901 doubled when escaped with a backslash.
903 u. Fixed the initialization of mailboxes to not cause maildirs to be read
904 (and stat(2) called for every message file) at shell startup.
906 v. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not display $PS2 when the read builtin
907 reads a line continued with a backslash.
909 w. Fixed a bug that caused errors in word splitting when $IFS contained
910 characters used for internal quoting.
912 x. Fixed bugs that caused problems with output from shell builtins not being
913 completely displayed on some systems.
915 y. Fixed a bug that caused output to be lost when a redirection is acting on
916 the shell's output file descriptor.
918 z. Fixed bugs caused by shell builtins not checking for all write errors.
920 aa. Fixed a problem that caused the shell to dump core if expansions on the
921 pattern passed to the pattern removal word expansions resulted in expansion
924 bb. Fixed a bug that caused bash to loop infinitely after creating and
925 waiting for 4096 jobs.
927 cc. Fixed a bug that caused bash to lose the status of a background job under
928 certain circumstances.
930 dd. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not look in the temporary environment
931 when performing variable lookup under certain circumstances.
933 ee. Fixed a bug that caused bash to close file descriptors greater than 10
934 when they were used in redirections.
936 ff. Fixed a problem that caused the shell to attempt to read from the standard
937 input when called as `bash -i script'.
939 gg. Fixed a memory leak and variable initialization problems when the -v option
940 was supplied to `printf' that could cause incorrect results.
942 hh. Fixed a bug that caused the `read' builtin to count bytes when the -n option
943 was supplied, rather than (possibly multibyte) characters.
945 ii. Fixed a bug when displaying a function due to not converting the function
948 jj. Changed job control initialization to ensure that the shell has a tty
949 as its controlling terminal before enabling job control.
951 kk. Fixed a bug with the `test' builtin that caused it to misinterpret
952 arguments beginning with `-' but containing more than one character.
954 ll. Fixed bug that could cause the shell to dump core in certain cases where
955 a command sets the SIGINT disposition to the default.
957 mm. Fixed a bug in the pattern replacement (affecting both word expansion
958 and the `fc' builtin) that occurred when the pattern and replacement
961 nn. Fixed a bug that caused an arithmetic evaluation error to disable all
964 oo. Fixed a bug in pathname expansion that caused it to interpret backslashes
965 in the pathname as quoting characters.
967 pp. Fixed a bug in the replacement getcwd() implementation that could cause
968 memory to be overwritten.
970 qq. When in Posix mode, the `ulimit' builtin now uses a block size of 512 for
971 the `-c' and `-f' options.
973 rr. Brace expansion now allows process substitutions to pass through unchanged.
975 ss. Fixed a problem in the command name completion code to avoid quoting
976 escaped special characters twice when the command name begins with a tilde.
978 tt. Fixed a problem in the printf builtin that resulted in single-byte
979 output for the "'" escape, even when using multibyte characters.
981 uu. Fixed a bug that caused the failure exit status to be lost when redirections
982 attached to a compound command failed.
984 vv. Fixed a bug that caused the internal random number generator to not be
985 re-seeded correctly when creating a subshell.
987 ww. Fixed a bug that could cause the bash replacement getcwd to overwrite
990 xx. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not receive SIGINT if it was sent
991 while the shell was waiting for a command substitution to terminate, and
992 make sure the exit status is correct when it does.
994 yy. Fixed a bug that resulted in the second and subsequent children spawned
995 by a shell begun to run a command substitution being placed into the
998 zz. Fixed a bug that caused the results of successful tilde expansion to be
999 subject to pathname expansion and word splitting.
1001 aaa. Fixed a bug that could cause the shell to hang if it encountered an
1002 error that caused it to jump back to the top processing loop during a
1003 command substitution or `eval' command.
1005 bbb. Fixed a bug that caused the `read' builtin to use the tty's attributes
1006 instead of those of the file descriptor passed with the -u option when
1007 processing the -n and -d options.
1009 ccc. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect expansion of ${array[@]:foo} if the
1010 first character of $IFS was not whitespace.
1012 ddd. Fixed a bug that occurred when scanning for the ending delimiter of a
1013 ${parameter/pat/sub} expansion.
1015 eee. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to inappropriately expand command
1016 substitutions in words when expanding directory names for completion.
1018 fff. Fixed a bug that caused the `fc' builtin to look too far back in the
1019 history list under certain circumstances.
1021 ggg. Fixed a bug that caused a shell running in Posix mode to search $PWD for
1022 a file specified as an argument to source/. when the file was not found
1025 hhh. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to modify the case of a command word
1026 found via command completion when the shell was performing case-
1027 insensitive completion.
1029 iii. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to search $PATH for an argument to
1030 source/. even when it contained a `/'.
1032 jjj. Fixed a bug that caused brace expansion to misorder expansions when the
1033 locale did not have a collating order like aAbBcC...zZ.
1035 kkk. Fixed a bug that did not allow `set +o history' to have any effect when
1036 run in a startup file or from a sourced file.
1038 lll. Fixed a bug with the precedence of the ?: conditional arithmetic operator.
1040 mmm. Fixed a bug that caused side effects of temporary variable assignments
1041 to persist in the shell environment.
1043 nnn. Fixed a bug that caused the terminal to be left in non-canonical mode
1044 when using editing commands that invoke the an editor on the current
1047 ooo. Fixed a bug that caused globbing characters and characters in $IFS to not
1048 be quoted appropriately when displaying assignment statements.
1050 ppp. Fixed a bug that caused the `-e' option to be inherited when sourcing a
1051 file or evaluating a command with `eval' even if the return value of the
1052 command was supposed to be ignored.
1054 qqq. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt to created variables with
1055 invalid names if such names appeared in the initial environment.
1057 rrr. Fixed a bug with quote removal in strings where the final character is a
1060 sss. Fixed a bug that caused the effects of special variables to persist even
1061 when the variables were unset as part of the shell reinitializing itself
1062 to execute a shell script.
1064 ttt. Fixed a bug that caused the history to not be saved after `history -c' or
1065 `history -d' was executed until a sufficient number of commands had been
1066 saved to the history.
1068 uuu. Bash now parses command substitutions according to Posix rules: parsing
1069 the command contained in $() to find the closing delimiter.
1071 vvv. Fixed a bug that caused traps on SIGCHLD set in a SIGCHLD handler to
1074 www. Fixed a bug that didn't allow SIGCHLD to interrupt the `wait' builtin
1077 xxx. Invalid numeric arguments to shell builtins no longer cause the shell to
1078 short-circuit any executing compound command.
1080 yyy. Fixed a bug that caused the exit status to be lost when `break' was
1081 used to short-circuit a loop's execution.
1083 zzz. Fixed a bug that caused stray ^? characters to be left in expansions of
1086 aaaa. Bash now prints better error messages for here documents terminated by
1087 EOF and for identifying the incorrect token in an invalid arithmetic
1090 bbbb. Fixed a bug in the variable length word expansion that caused it to
1091 incorrectly calculate the number of multibyte characters.
1093 cccc. Fixed a race condition that could result in the top-level shell setting
1094 the terminal's process group to an incorrect value if the process
1095 group was changed by a child of a child of the shell.
1097 dddd. Fixed a bug that caused here documents belonging to commands within a
1098 compound command to be displayed in a syntactially-incorrect form, which
1099 prevented them from being re-read as input.
1101 eeee. The shell displays more warnings about failures to set the locale.
1103 ffff. Fixed a bug that caused the body of a here-document to not be saved to
1106 gggg. Fixed a bug that caused configure to incorrectly conclude that FreeBSD
1107 had /dev/fd available, resulting in problems with process substitution.
1109 2. Changes to Readline
1111 a. Fixed a number of redisplay errors in environments supporting multibyte
1114 b. Fixed bugs in vi command mode that caused motion commands to inappropriately
1117 c. When using the arrow keys in vi insertion mode, readline allows movement
1118 beyond the current end of the line (unlike command mode).
1120 d. Fixed bugs that caused readline to loop when the terminal has been taken
1121 away and reads return -1/EIO.
1123 e. Fixed bugs in redisplay occurring when displaying prompts containing
1124 invisible characters.
1126 f. Fixed a bug that caused the completion append character to not be reset to
1127 the default after an application-specified completion function changed it.
1129 g. Fixed a problem that caused incorrect positioning of the cursor while in
1130 emacs editing mode when moving forward at the end of a line while using
1131 a locale supporting multibyte characters.
1133 h. Fixed an off-by-one error that caused readline to drop every 511th
1134 character of buffered input.
1136 i. Fixed a bug that resulted in SIGTERM not being caught or cleaned up.
1138 j. Fixed redisplay bugs caused by multiline prompts with invisible characters
1139 or no characters following the final newline.
1141 k. Fixed redisplay bug caused by prompts consisting solely of invisible
1144 l. Fixed a bug in the code that buffers characters received very quickly in
1145 succession which caused characters to be dropped.
1147 m. Fixed a bug that caused readline to reference uninitialized data structures
1148 if it received a SIGWINCH before completing initialzation.
1150 n. Fixed a bug that caused the vi-mode `last command' to be set incorrectly
1151 and therefore unrepeatable.
1153 o. Fixed a bug that caused readline to disable echoing when it was being used
1154 with an output file descriptor that was not a terminal.
1156 p. Readline now blocks SIGINT while manipulating internal data structures
1159 q. Fixed a bug in redisplay that caused readline to segfault when pasting a
1160 very long line (over 130,000 characters).
1162 r. Fixed bugs in redisplay when using prompts with no visible printing
1165 3. New Features in Bash
1167 a. When using substring expansion on the positional parameters, a starting
1168 index of 0 now causes $0 to be prefixed to the list.
1170 b. The `help' builtin now prints its columns with entries sorted vertically
1171 rather than horizontally.
1173 c. There is a new variable, $BASHPID, which always returns the process id of
1176 d. There is a new `autocd' option that, when enabled, causes bash to attempt
1177 to `cd' to a directory name that is supplied as the first word of a
1180 e. There is a new `checkjobs' option that causes the shell to check for and
1181 report any running or stopped jobs at exit.
1183 f. The programmable completion code exports a new COMP_TYPE variable, set to
1184 a character describing the type of completion being attempted.
1186 g. The programmable completion code exports a new COMP_KEY variable, set to
1187 the character that caused the completion to be invoked (e.g., TAB).
1189 h. If creation of a child process fails due to insufficient resources, bash
1190 will try again several times before reporting failure.
1192 i. The programmable completion code now uses the same set of characters as
1193 readline when breaking the command line into a list of words.
1195 j. The block multiplier for the ulimit -c and -f options is now 512 when in
1196 Posix mode, as Posix specifies.
1198 k. Changed the behavior of the read builtin to save any partial input received
1199 in the specified variable when the read builtin times out. This also
1200 results in variables specified as arguments to read to be set to the empty
1201 string when there is no input available. When the read builtin times out,
1202 it returns an exit status greater than 128.
1204 l. The shell now has the notion of a `compatibility level', controlled by
1205 new variables settable by `shopt'. Setting this variable currently
1206 restores the bash-3.1 behavior when processing quoted strings on the rhs
1207 of the `=~' operator to the `[[' command.
1209 m. The `ulimit' builtin now has new -b (socket buffer size) and -T (number
1210 of threads) options.
1212 n. The -p option to `declare' now displays all variable values and attributes
1213 (or function values and attributes if used with -f).
1215 o. There is a new `compopt' builtin that allows completion functions to modify
1216 completion options for existing completions or the completion currently
1219 p. The `read' builtin has a new -i option which inserts text into the reply
1220 buffer when using readline.
1222 q. A new `-E' option to the complete builtin allows control of the default
1223 behavior for completion on an empty line.
1225 r. There is now limited support for completing command name words containing
1226 globbing characters.
1228 s. Changed format of internal help documentation for all builtins to roughly
1229 follow man page format.
1231 t. The `help' builtin now has a new -d option, to display a short description,
1232 and a -m option, to print help information in a man page-like format.
1234 u. There is a new `mapfile' builtin to populate an array with lines from a
1237 v. If a command is not found, the shell attempts to execute a shell function
1238 named `command_not_found_handle', supplying the command words as the
1241 w. There is a new shell option: `globstar'. When enabled, the globbing code
1242 treats `**' specially -- it matches all directories (and files within
1243 them, when appropriate) recursively.
1245 x. There is a new shell option: `dirspell'. When enabled, the filename
1246 completion code performs spelling correction on directory names during
1249 y. The `-t' option to the `read' builtin now supports fractional timeout
1252 z. Brace expansion now allows zero-padding of expanded numeric values and
1253 will add the proper number of zeroes to make sure all values contain the
1254 same number of digits.
1256 aa. There is a new bash-specific bindable readline function: `dabbrev-expand'.
1257 It uses menu completion on a set of words taken from the history list.
1259 bb. The command assigned to a key sequence with `bind -x' now sets two new
1260 variables in the environment of the executed command: READLINE_LINE_BUFFER
1261 and READLINE_POINT. The command can change the current readline line
1262 and cursor position by modifying READLINE_LINE_BUFFER and READLINE_POINT,
1265 cc. There is a new &>> redirection operator, which appends the standard output
1266 and standard error to the named file.
1268 dd. The parser now understands `|&' as a synonym for `2>&1 |', which redirects
1269 the standard error for a command through a pipe.
1271 ee. The new `;&' case statement action list terminator causes execution to
1272 continue with the action associated with the next pattern in the
1273 statement rather than terminating the command.
1275 ff. The new `;;&' case statement action list terminator causes the shell to
1276 test the next set of patterns after completing execution of the current
1277 action, rather than terminating the command.
1279 gg. The shell understands a new variable: PROMPT_DIRTRIM. When set to an
1280 integer value greater than zero, prompt expansion of \w and \W will
1281 retain only that number of trailing pathname components and replace
1282 the intervening characters with `...'.
1284 hh. There are new case-modifying word expansions: uppercase (^[^]) and
1285 lowercase (,[,]). They can work on either the first character or
1286 array element, or globally. They accept an optional shell pattern
1287 that determines which characters to modify. There is an optionally-
1288 configured feature to include capitalization operators.
1290 ii. The shell provides associative array variables, with the appropriate
1291 support to create, delete, assign values to, and expand them.
1293 jj. The `declare' builtin now has new -l (convert value to lowercase upon
1294 assignment) and -u (convert value to uppercase upon assignment) options.
1295 There is an optionally-configurable -c option to capitalize a value at
1298 kk. There is a new `coproc' reserved word that specifies a coprocess: an
1299 asynchronous command run with two pipes connected to the creating shell.
1300 Coprocs can be named. The input and output file descriptors and the
1301 PID of the coprocess are available to the calling shell in variables
1302 with coproc-specific names.
1304 4. New Features in Readline
1306 a. A new variable, rl_sort_completion_matches; allows applications to inhibit
1307 match list sorting (but beware: some things don't work right if
1308 applications do this).
1310 b. A new variable, rl_completion_invoking_key; allows applications to discover
1311 the key that invoked rl_complete or rl_menu_complete.
1313 c. The functions rl_block_sigint and rl_release_sigint are now public and
1314 available to calling applications who want to protect critical sections
1317 d. The functions rl_save_state and rl_restore_state are now public and
1318 available to calling applications; documented rest of readline's state
1321 e. A new user-settable variable, `history-size', allows setting the maximum
1322 number of entries in the history list.
1324 f. There is a new implementation of menu completion, with several improvements
1325 over the old; the most notable improvement is a better `completions
1328 g. The menu completion code now uses the rl_menu_completion_entry_function
1329 variable, allowing applications to provide their own menu completion
1332 h. There is support for replacing a prefix of a pathname with a `...' when
1333 displaying possible completions. This is controllable by setting the
1334 `completion-prefix-display-length' variable. Matches with a common prefix
1335 longer than this value have the common prefix replaced with `...'.
1337 i. There is a new `revert-all-at-newline' variable. If enabled, readline will
1338 undo all outstanding changes to all history lines when `accept-line' is
1341 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1342 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-release,
1343 and the previous version, bash-3.2-beta.
1347 a. Fixed a bug that caused the temporary environment passed to a command to
1348 affect the shell's environment under certain circumstances.
1350 b. Fixed a bug in the printf builtin that caused the %q format specifier to
1351 ignore empty string arguments.
1353 c. Improved multibyte character environment detection at configuration time.
1355 d. Fixed a bug in the read builtin that left spurious escape characters in the
1356 input after processing backslashes when assigning to an array variable.
1358 2. Changes to Readline
1360 a. Fixed a redisplay bug that occurred in multibyte-capable locales when the
1361 prompt was one character longer than the screen width.
1362 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1363 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-beta,
1364 and the previous version, bash-3.2-alpha.
1368 a. Changed the lexical analyzer to treat locale-specific blank characters as
1371 b. Fixed a bug in command printing to avoid confusion between redirections and
1372 process substitution.
1374 c. Fixed problems with cross-compiling originating from inherited environment
1377 d. Added write error reporting to printf builtin.
1379 e. Fixed a bug in the variable expansion code that could cause a core dump in
1380 a multi-byte locale.
1382 f. Fixed a bug that caused substring expansion of a null string to return
1385 g. BASH_COMMAND now retains its previous value while executing commands as the
1386 result of a trap, as the documentation states.
1388 2. Changes to Readline
1390 a. Fixed a bug with prompt redisplay in a multi-byte locale to avoid redrawing
1391 the prompt and input line multiple times.
1393 b. Fixed history expansion to not be confused by here-string redirection.
1395 c. Readline no longer treats read errors by converting them to newlines, as
1396 it does with EOF. This caused partial lines to be returned from readline().
1398 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1399 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-alpha,
1400 and the previous version, bash-3.1-release.
1404 a. Fixed a source bug that caused the minimal configuration to not compile.
1406 b. Fixed memory leaks in error handling for the `read' builtin.
1408 c. Changed the [[ and (( compound commands to set PIPESTATUS with their exit
1411 d. Fixed some parsing problems with compound array assignments.
1413 e. Added additional configuration changes for: NetBSD (incomplete multibyte
1416 f. Fixed two bugs with local array variable creation when shadowing a variable
1417 of the same name from a previous context.
1419 g. Fixed the `read' builtin to restore the correct set of completion functions
1420 if a timeout occurs.
1422 h. Added code to defer the initialization of HISTSIZE (and its stifling of the
1423 history list) until the history file is loaded, allowing a startup file to
1424 override the default value.
1426 i. Tightened up the arithmetic expression parsing to produce better error
1427 messages when presented with invalid operators.
1429 j. Fixed the cross-compilation support to build the signal list at shell
1430 invocation rather than compile time if cross-compiling.
1432 k. Fixed multibyte support for non-gcc compilers (or compilers that do not
1433 allow automatic array variable sizing based on a non-constant value).
1435 l. Several fixes to the code that manages the list of terminated jobs and
1436 their exit statuses, and the list of active and recently-terminated jobs
1437 to avoid pid aliasing/wraparound and allocation errors.
1439 m. Fixed a problem that allowed scripts to die due to SIGINT while waiting
1440 for children, even when started in the background or otherwise ignoring
1443 n. Fixed a bug that caused shells invoked as -/bin/bash from not being
1444 recognized as login shells.
1446 o. Fixed a problem that caused shells in the background to give the terminal
1447 to a process group other than the foreground shell process group.
1449 p. Fixed a problem with extracting the `varname' in ${#varname}.
1451 q. Fixed the code that handles SIGQUIT to not exit immediately -- thereby
1452 calling functions that may not be called in a signal handler context --
1453 but set a flag and exit afterward (like SIGINT).
1455 r. Changed the brace expansion code to skip over braces that don't begin a
1456 valid matched brace expansion construct.
1458 s. Fixed `typeset' and `declare' to not require that their shell function
1459 operands to be valid shell identifiers.
1461 t. Changed `test' to use access(2) with a temporary uid/euid swap when testing
1462 file attributes and running setuid, and access(2) in most other cases.
1464 u. Changed completion code to not attempt command name completion on a line
1465 consisting solely of whitespace when no_empty_command_completion is set.
1467 v. The `hash' builtin now prints nothing in posix mode when the hash table is
1468 empty, and prints a message to that effect to stdout instead of stderr
1469 when not in posix mode.
1471 w. Fixed a bug in the extended pattern matching code that caused it to fail to
1472 match periods with certain patterns.
1474 x. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing filename
1475 generation in directories with thousands of files.
1477 y. Returned to the original Bourne shell rules for parsing ``: no recursive
1478 parsing of embedded quoted strings or ${...} constructs.
1480 z. The inheritence of the DEBUG, RETURN, and ERR traps is now dependent only
1481 on the settings of the `functrace' and `errtrace' shell options, rather
1482 than whether or not the shell is in debugging mode.
1484 aa. Fixed a problem with $HOME being converted to ~ in the expansion of
1485 members of the DIRSTACK array.
1487 bb. Fixed a problem with quoted arguments to arithmetic expansions in certain
1490 cc. The command word completion code now no longer returns matching directories
1491 while searching $PATH.
1493 dd. Fixed a bug with zero-padding and precision handling in snprintf()
1496 ee. Fixed a bug that caused the command substitution code not to take embedded
1497 shell comments into account.
1499 ff. Fixed a bug that caused $((...);(...)) to be misinterpreted as an
1500 arithmetic substitution.
1502 gg. Fixed a bug in the prompt expansion code that inappropriately added a
1503 \001 before a \002 under certain circumstances.
1505 hh. Fixed a bug that caused `unset LANG' to not properly reset the locale
1506 (previous versions would set the locale back to what it was when bash
1507 was started rather than the system's "native" locale).
1509 ii. Fixed a bug that could cause file descriptors > 10 to not be closed even
1510 when closed explicitly by a script.
1512 jj. Fixed a bug that caused single quotes to be stripped from ANSI-C quoting
1513 inside double-quoted command substitutions.
1515 kk. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when `return' was executed as the
1516 last element of a pipeline inside a shell function.
1518 ll. Fixed a bug that caused DEBUG trap strings to overwrite commands stored in
1521 2. Changes to Readline
1523 a. Fixed a problem that caused segmentation faults when using readline in
1524 callback mode and typing consecutive DEL characters on an empty line.
1526 b. Fixed several redisplay problems with multibyte characters, all having to
1527 do with the different code paths and variable meanings between single-byte
1528 and multibyte character redisplay.
1530 c. Fixed a problem with key sequence translation when presented with the
1533 d. Fixed a problem that prevented the `a' command in vi mode from being
1534 undone and redone properly.
1536 e. Fixed a problem that prevented empty inserts in vi mode from being undone
1539 f. Fixed a problem that caused readline to initialize with an incorrect idea
1540 of whether or not the terminal can autowrap.
1542 g. Fixed output of key bindings (like bash `bind -p') to honor the setting of
1543 convert-meta and use \e where appropriate.
1545 h. Changed the default filename completion function to call the filename
1546 dequoting function if the directory completion hook isn't set. This means
1547 that any directory completion hooks need to dequote the directory name,
1548 since application-specific hooks need to know how the word was quoted,
1549 even if no other changes are made.
1551 i. Fixed a bug with creating the prompt for a non-interactive search string
1552 when there are non-printing characters in the primary prompt.
1554 j. Fixed a bug that caused prompts with invisible characters to be redrawn
1555 multiple times in a multibyte locale.
1557 k. Fixed a bug that could cause the key sequence scanning code to return the
1560 l. Fixed a problem with the callback interface that caused it to fail when
1561 using multi-character keyboard macros.
1563 m. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when an edited history entry was
1564 re-executed under certain conditions.
1566 n. Fixed a bug that caused readline to reference freed memory when attmpting
1567 to display a portion of the prompt.
1569 3. New Features in Bash
1571 a. Changed the parameter pattern replacement functions to not anchor the
1572 pattern at the beginning of the string if doing global replacement - that
1573 combination doesn't make any sense.
1575 b. When running in `word expansion only' mode (--wordexp option), inhibit
1576 process substitution.
1578 c. Loadable builtins now work on MacOS X 10.[34].
1580 d. Shells running in posix mode no longer set $HOME, as POSIX requires.
1582 e. The code that checks for binary files being executed as shell scripts now
1583 checks only for NUL rather than any non-printing character.
1585 f. Quoting the string argument to the [[ command's =~ operator now forces
1586 string matching, as with the other pattern-matching operators.
1588 4. New Features in Readline
1590 a. Calling applications can now set the keyboard timeout to 0, allowing
1593 b. The value of SYS_INPUTRC (configurable at compilation time) is now used as
1594 the default last-ditch startup file.
1596 c. The history file reading functions now allow windows-like \r\n line
1599 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1600 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-release,
1601 and the previous version, bash-3.1-rc2.
1603 1. Changes to Readline
1605 a. Several changes to the multibyte redisplay code to fix problems with
1606 prompts containing invisible characters.
1608 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1609 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-rc2,
1610 and the previous version, bash-3.1-rc1.
1614 a. Fixed a bug that caused a DEBUG trap to overwrite a command string that's
1615 eventually attached to a background job.
1617 b. Changed some code so that filenames with leading tildes with spaces in the
1618 name aren't tilde-expanded by the bash completion code.
1620 c. Fixed a bug that caused the pushd builtin to fail to change to
1621 directories with leading `-'.
1623 d. Fixed a small memory leak in the programmable completion code.
1625 2. Changes to Readline
1627 a. Fixed a redisplay bug caused by moving the cursor vertically to a line
1628 with invisible characters in the prompt in a multibyte locale.
1630 b. Fixed a bug that could cause the terminal special chars to be bound in the
1631 wrong keymap in vi mode.
1633 3. New Features in Bash
1635 a. If compiled for strict POSIX conformance, LINES and COLUMNS may now
1636 override the true terminal size.
1638 4. New Features in Readline
1640 a. A new external application-controllable variable that allows the LINES
1641 and COLUMNS environment variables to set the window size regardless of
1642 what the kernel returns.
1644 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1645 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-rc1,
1646 and the previous version, bash-3.1-beta1.
1650 a. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps due to accessing the current
1651 pipeline while in the middle of modifying it.
1653 b. Fixed a bug that caused pathnames with backslashes still quoting characters
1654 to be passed to opendir().
1656 c. Command word completion now obeys the setting of completion-ignore-case.
1658 d. Fixed a problem with redirection that caused file descriptors greater than
1659 2 to be inappropriately marked as close-on-exec.
1661 e. In Posix mode, after `wait' is called to wait for a particular process
1662 explicitly, that process is removed from the list of processes known to
1663 the shell, and subsequent attempts to wait for it return errors.
1665 f. Fixed a bug that caused extended pattern matching to incorrectly scan
1666 backslash-escaped pattern characters.
1668 g. Fixed a synchronization problem that could cause core dumps when handling
1671 h. Fixed a bug that caused an unmatched backquote to be accepted without an
1672 error when processing here documents.
1674 i. Fixed a small memory leak in the `cd' builtin.
1676 j. Fix for MacOS X so it gets the values for the HOSTTYPE, MACHTYPE, and
1677 OSTYPE variables at build time, to support universal binaries.
1679 k. Fixed a bug that could cause an exit trap to return the exit status of
1680 the trap command rather than the status as it was before the trap was
1681 run as the shell's exit status.
1683 2. New Features in Bash
1685 3. Changes to Readline
1687 a. Fixed a bug that caused reversing the incremental search direction to
1690 b. Fixed the vi-mode `U' command to only undo up to the first time insert mode
1691 was entered, as Posix specifies.
1693 c. Fixed a bug in the vi-mode `r' command that left the cursor in the wrong
1696 4. New Features in Readline
1698 a. New application-callable auxiliary function, rl_variable_value, returns
1699 a string corresponding to a readline variable's value.
1701 b. When parsing inputrc files and variable binding commands, the parser
1702 strips trailing whitespace from values assigned to boolean variables
1703 before checking them.
1706 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1707 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-beta1,
1708 and the previous version, bash-3.1-alpha1.
1712 a. Added some system-specific signal names.
1714 b. Fixed a typo in the ulimit builtin to make `x' the right option to
1715 maniuplate the limit on file locks.
1717 c. Fixed a problem with using += to append to index 0 of an array variable
1718 when not using subscript syntax.
1720 d. A few changes to configure.in to remove calls to obsolete or outdated
1723 e. Make sure changes to variables bash handles specially (e.g., LC_ALL) are
1724 made when the variable is set in the temporary environment to a command.
1726 f. Make sure changes to variables bash handles specially (e.g., LC_ALL) are
1727 made when the variable is modified using `printf -v'.
1729 g. The export environment is now remade on cygwin when HOME is changed, so
1730 DLLs bash is linked against pick up the new value. This fixes problems
1731 with tilde expansion when linking against and already-installed readline.
1733 h. Small fix to the logic for performing tilde expansion in posix mode, so
1734 expansion on the right-hand side of an assignment statement takes place.
1736 i. Fixed a bug that prevented redirections associated with a shell function
1737 from being executed when in a subshell.
1739 j. Fixed `source' and `.' builtins to not require an executable file when
1740 searching $PATH for a file to source.
1742 k. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect word splitting in a function when IFS
1743 was declared local, then unset.
1745 l. Fixed a problem with the `kill' builtin that prevented sending signals
1746 to a process group under certain circumstances when providing a pid < 0.
1748 m. When in POSIX mode, `pwd' now checks that the value it prints is the same
1749 directory as `.', even when displaying $PWD.
1751 n. Fixed a problem with the `read' builtin when reading a script from standard
1752 input and reading data from the same file.
1754 o. Fixed a problem with the `type' and `command' builtins that caused absolute
1755 pathnames to be displayed incorrectly.
1757 p. Some changes to the `bg' builtin for POSIX conformance.
1759 q. The `fc' builtin now removes the `fc' command that caused it to invoke an
1760 editor on specified history entries from the history entirely, rather than
1763 r. When in POSIX mode, the `v' command in vi editing mode simply invokes vi
1764 on the current command, rather than checking $FCEDIT and $EDITOR.
1766 s. Fixed a small memory leak in the pathname canonicalization code.
1768 t. Fixed a bug that caused the expanded value of a $'...' string to be
1769 incorrectly re-quoted if it occurred within a double-quoted ${...}
1770 parameter expansion.
1772 u. Restored default emacs-mode key binding of M-TAB to dynamic-complete-history.
1774 v. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when interrupting loops running builtins
1777 w. Make sure that some of the functions bash provides replacements for are
1780 x. The code that scans embedded commands for the parser (`...` and $(...)) is
1781 now more aware of embedded comments and their effect on quoted strings.
1783 y. Changed the `-n' option to the `history' builtin to not reset the number of
1784 history lines read in the current session after reading the new lines from
1785 the history file if the history is being appended when it is written to
1786 the file, since the appending takes care of the problem that the adjustment
1787 was intended to solve.
1789 z. Improved the error message displayed when a shell script fails to execute
1790 because the environment and size of command line arguments are too large.
1792 aa. A small fix to make sure that $HISTCMD is evaluated whenever the shell is
1793 saving commands to the history list, not just when HISTSIZE is defined.
1795 2. Changes to Readline
1797 a. The `change-case' command now correctly changes the case of multibyte
1800 b. Changes to the shared library construction scripts to deal with Windows
1801 DLL naming conventions for Cygwin.
1803 c. Fixed the redisplay code to avoid core dumps resulting from a poorly-timed
1806 d. Fixed the non-incremental search code in vi mode to dispose of any current
1807 undo list when copying a line from the history into the current editing
1810 e. The variable assignment code now ignores whitespace at the end of lines
1811 when assigning to boolean variables.
1813 f. The `C-w' binding in incremental search now understands multibyte
1816 3. New Features in Bash
1818 a. A new configuration option, `--enable-strict-posix-default', which will
1819 build bash to be POSIX conforming by default.
1821 4. New Features in Readline
1823 a. If the rl_completion_query_items is set to a value < 0, readline never
1824 asks the user whether or not to view the possible completions.
1826 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1827 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-alpha1,
1828 and the previous version, bash-3.0-release.
1832 a. Fixed a bug that caused bash to crash if referencing an unset local array.
1834 b. Fixed a problem that caused tilde expansion to not be performed before
1835 attempting globbing word completion.
1837 c. Fixed an incompatibility so that a first argument to trap that's a valid
1838 signal number will be trated as a signal rather than a command to execute.
1840 d. Fixed ${#word} expansion to correctly compute the length of a string
1841 containing multibyte characters.
1843 e. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not pass the correct flags for signal
1844 disposition to child processes.
1846 f. Fixed a bug that caused `fc -l' to list one too many history entries.
1848 g. Some fixes to `fc' for POSIX conformance.
1850 h. Some fixes to job status display for POSIX conformance.
1852 i. Fixed a bug that caused `command -v' to display output if a command was not
1853 found -- it should be silent.
1855 j. In POSIX mode, `type' and `command -[vV]' do not report non-executable
1856 files, even if the shell will attempt to execute them.
1858 k. Fixed a bug that caused the `==' operator to the [[ command to not attempt
1859 extended pattern matching.
1861 l. Fixed the brace expansion code to handle characters whose value exceeds 128.
1863 m. Fixed `printf' to handle strings with a leading `\0' whose length is
1866 n. Fixed a couple of problems with brace expansion where `${' was handled
1869 o. Fixed off-by-one error when calculating the upper bound of `offset' when
1870 processing the ${array[@]:offset:length} expansion.
1872 p. System-specific configuration changes for: FreeBSD 5.x, Interix, MacOS X
1873 10.4, Linux 2.4+ kernels, Linux 3.x kernels, Dragonfly BSD, QNX 6.x,
1876 q. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to ignore the status of the rightmost
1877 command in a pipeline when the `pipefail' option was enabled.
1879 r. Fixed a completion bug that caused core dumps when expanding a directory
1882 s. Fixed a bug that prevented `hash -d' from removing commands from the hash
1885 t. Fixed word splitting to avoid really bad quadratic performance when
1886 expanding long lists.
1888 u. Fixed a bug that caused negative offsets in substring expansion to use the
1891 v. Fixed a bug in printf that caused it to not return failure on write errors.
1893 w. Fixed a bug that caused commands in subshells to not be properly timed.
1895 x. The shell parser no longer attempts to parse a compound assignment specially
1896 unless in a position where an assignment statement is acceptable or parsing
1897 arguments to a builtin that accepts assignment statements.
1899 y. Fixed a problem that caused a `case' statement to be added to the history
1900 incorrectly as a single command if the `case word' was on one line and the
1903 z. Fixed a problem that caused internal shell quoting characters to be
1904 incorrectly quoted with backslashes under some circumstances.
1906 aa. The shell now performs correct word splitting when IFS contains multibyte
1909 bb. The mail checking code now resets the cached file information if the size
1910 drops to 0, even if the times don't change.
1912 cc. A completed command name that is found in $PATH as well as the name of a
1913 directory in the current directory no longer has a slash appended in certain
1914 circumstances: a single instance found in $PATH when `.' is not in $PATH,
1915 and multiple instances found in $PATH, even when `.' is in $PATH.
1917 dd. Incorporated tilde expansion into the word expansion code rather than as a
1918 separately-called function, fixing some cases where it was performed
1919 inappropriately (e.g., after the second `=' in an assignment statement or
1920 in a double-quoted parameter expansion).
1922 ee. Fixed several bugs encountered when parsing compound assignment statements,
1923 so that compound assignments appearing as arguments to builtins are no
1924 longer double-expanded.
1926 ff. Fixed a bug in the command execution code that caused asynchronous commands
1927 containing command substitutions to not put the terminal in the wrong
1930 gg. Bash now handles the case where the WCONTINUED flag causes waitpid() to
1931 return -1/EINVAL at runtime as well as configuration time.
1933 hh. Fixed parser to generate an error when the pipeline `argument' to `!' or
1936 ii. The shell now takes a little more care when manipulating file descriptors
1937 greater than 9 with the `exec' builtin.
1939 jj. Fixed a bug that caused variable assignments preceding the `command' builtin
1940 preceding a special builtin to be preserved after the command completed in
1943 kk. Fixed a bug that allowed variables beginning with a digit to be created.
1945 ll. Fixed a bug that caused a \<newline> to be removed when parsing a $'...'
1948 mm. A shell whose name begins with `-' will now be a restricted shell if the
1949 remainder of the name indicates it should be restricted.
1951 nn. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if FUNCNAME were changed or unset
1952 during a function's execution.
1954 oo. Fixed a bug that caused executing a `return' in a function to not execute
1955 a RETURN trap. The RETURN trap is inherited by shell functions only if
1956 function tracing is globally enabled or has been enabled for that function.
1958 pp. Fixed cases where var[@] was not handled exactly like var, when var is a
1961 qq. Fixed a bug that caused the first character after a SIGINT to be discarded
1962 under certain circumstances.
1964 rr. Fixed exit status code so that a suspended job returns 128+signal as its
1965 exit status (preventing commands after it in `&&' lists from being
1968 ss. Fixed a bug that caused the shell parser state to be changed by executing
1969 a shell function as a result of word completion.
1971 tt. Fixed a long-standing bug that caused '\177' characters in variable
1972 values to be discarded when expanded in double-quoted strings.
1974 uu. Fixed a bug that caused $RANDOM to be re-seeded multiple times in a
1975 subshell environment.
1977 vv. Extensive changes to the job management code to avoid the pid-reuse and
1978 pid-aliasing problems caused by retaining the exit status of too many jobs,
1979 but still retain as many background job statuses as POSIX requires.
1981 ww. Fixed a parser bug in processing \<newline> that caused things like
1986 to not work correctly.
1988 xx. `pwd -P' now sets $PWD to a directory name containing no symbolic links
1989 when in posix mode, as POSIX requires.
1991 yy. In posix mode, bash no longer sets $PWD to a name containing no symbolic
1992 links if a directory is chosen from $CDPATH.
1994 zz. The word splitting code now treats an IFS character that is not space,
1995 tab, or newline and any adjacent IFS white space as a single delimiter, as
1998 aaa. The `read' builtin now checks whether or not the number of fields read is
1999 exactly the same as the number of variables instead of just assigning the
2000 rest of the line (minus any trailing IFS white space) to the last
2001 variable. This is what POSIX/SUS/XPG all require.
2003 bbb. Fixed a bug that caused `read' to always check whether or not fd 0 was a
2004 pipe, even when reading from another file descriptor.
2006 ccc. Fixed a bug that caused short-circuiting of execution even if the return
2007 value was being inverted.
2009 ddd. Fixed a bug that caused a core dump while decoding \W escapes in PS1 if
2012 eee. Fixed a bug in `read' that counted internal quoting characters for the
2013 purposes of `read -n'.
2015 fff. Fixed a bug so that a function definition in a pipeline causes a child
2016 process to be forked at the right time.
2018 ggg. Bash will not attempt to link against a readline library that doesn't
2019 have rl_gnu_readline_p == 1.
2021 hhh. Fixed a bug that caused `read' to consume one too many characters when
2022 reading a fixed number of characters and the Nth character is a backslash.
2024 iii. Fixed a bug that caused `unset' on variables in the temporary environment
2025 to leave them set when `unset' completed.
2027 jjj. Fixed a bug that caused bash to close fd 2 if an `exec' failed and the
2030 kkk. The completion code is more careful to not turn `/' or `///' into `//',
2031 for those systems on which `//' has special meaning.
2033 lll. Fixed a bug that caused command substitution in asynchronous commands to
2034 close the wrong file descriptors.
2036 mmm. The shell no longer prints status messages about terminated background
2037 processes unless job control is active.
2039 nnn. Fixed a bug that prevented multiple consecutive invocations of `history -s'
2040 from adding all the commands to the history list.
2042 ooo. Added a couple of changes to make arithmetic expansion more consistent in
2043 all its contexts (still not perfect).
2045 ppp. Fixed a bug that caused the parser to occasionally not find the right
2046 terminating "`" in an old-style command substitution.
2048 qqq. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when the shell was reading its non-
2049 interactive input from fd 0 and fd 0 was duplicated and restored using a
2050 combination of `exec' (to save) and redirection (to restore).
2052 rrr. Fixed a problem that caused loops in sourced scripts to not be cleaned
2053 up properly when a `return' is executed.
2055 sss. Change internal command substitution completion function to append a slash
2056 to directory names in the command.
2058 2. Changes to Readline
2060 a. Fixed a bug that caused multiliine prompts to be wrapped and displayed
2063 b. Fixed a bug that caused ^P/^N in emacs mode to fail to display the current
2066 c. Fixed a problem in computing the number of invisible characters on the first
2067 line of a prompt whose length exceeds the screen width.
2069 d. Fixed vi-mode searching so that failure preserves the current line rather
2070 than the last line in the history list.
2072 e. Fixed the vi-mode `~' command (change-case) to have the correct behavior at
2073 end-of-line when manipulating multibyte characters.
2075 f. Fixed the vi-mode `r' command (change-char) to have the correct behavior at
2076 end-of-line when manipulating multibyte characters.
2078 g. Fixed multiple bugs in the redisplay of multibyte characters: displaying
2079 prompts longer than the screen width containing multibyte characters,
2081 h. Fix the calculation of the number of physical characters in the prompt
2082 string when it contains multibyte characters.
2084 i. A non-zero value for the `rl_complete_suppress_append' variable now causes
2085 no `/' to be appended to a directory name.
2087 j. Fixed forward-word and backward-word to work when words contained
2088 multibyte characters.
2090 k. Fixed a bug in finding the delimiter of a `?' substring when performing
2091 history expansion in a locale that supports multibyte characters.
2093 l. Fixed a memory leak caused by not freeing the timestamp in a history entry.
2095 m. Fixed a bug that caused "\M-x" style key bindings to not obey the setting
2096 of the `convert-meta' variable.
2098 n. Fixed saving and restoring primary prompt when prompting for incremental
2099 and non-incremental searches; search prompts now display multibyte
2100 characters correctly.
2102 o. Fixed a bug that caused keys originally bound to self-insert but shadowed
2103 by a multi-character key sequence to not be inserted.
2105 p. Fixed code so rl_prep_term_function and rl_deprep_term_function aren't
2106 dereferenced if NULL (matching the documentation).
2108 q. Extensive changes to readline to add enough state so that commands
2109 requiring additional characters (searches, multi-key sequences, numeric
2110 arguments, commands requiring an additional specifier character like
2111 vi-mode change-char, etc.) work without synchronously waiting for
2114 r. Lots of changes so readline builds and runs on MinGW.
2116 s. Readline no longer tries to modify the terminal settings when running in
2119 t. The Readline display code no longer sets the location of the last invisible
2120 character in the prompt if the \[\] sequence is empty.
2122 3. New Features in Bash
2124 a. Bash now understands LC_TIME as a special variable so that time display
2125 tracks the current locale.
2127 b. BASH_ARGC, BASH_ARGV, BASH_SOURCE, and BASH_LINENO are no longer created
2128 as `invisible' variables and may not be unset.
2130 c. In POSIX mode, if `xpg_echo' option is enabled, the `echo' builtin doesn't
2131 try to interpret any options at all, as POSIX requires.
2133 d. The `bg' builtin now accepts multiple arguments, as POSIX seems to specify.
2135 e. Fixed vi-mode word completion and glob expansion to perform tilde
2138 f. The `**' mathematic exponentiation operator is now right-associative.
2140 g. The `ulimit' builtin has new options: -i (max number of pending signals),
2141 -q (max size of POSIX message queues), and -x (max number of file locks).
2143 h. A bare `%' once again expands to the current job when used as a job
2146 i. The `+=' assignment operator (append to the value of a string or array) is
2147 now supported for assignment statements and arguments to builtin commands
2148 that accept assignment statements.
2150 j. BASH_COMMAND now preserves its value when a DEBUG trap is executed.
2152 k. The `gnu_errfmt' option is enabled automatically if the shell is running
2153 in an emacs terminal window.
2155 l. New configuration option: --single-help-strings. Causes long help text
2156 to be written as a single string; intended to ease translation.
2158 m. The COMP_WORDBREAKS variable now causes the list of word break characters
2159 to be emptied when the variable is unset.
2161 n. An unquoted expansion of $* when $IFS is empty now causes the positional
2162 parameters to be concatenated if the expansion doesn't undergo word
2165 o. Bash now inherits $_ from the environment if it appears there at startup.
2167 p. New shell option: nocasematch. If non-zero, shell pattern matching ignores
2168 case when used by `case' and `[[' commands.
2170 q. The `printf' builtin takes a new option: -v var. That causes the output
2171 to be placed into var instead of on stdout.
2173 r. By default, the shell no longer reports processes dying from SIGPIPE.
2175 s. Bash now sets the extern variable `environ' to the export environment it
2176 creates, so C library functions that call getenv() (and can't use the
2177 shell-provided replacement) get current values of environment variables.
2179 4. New Features in Readline
2181 a. The key sequence sent by the keypad `delete' key is now automatically
2182 bound to delete-char.
2184 b. A negative argument to menu-complete now cycles backward through the
2187 c. A new bindable readline variable: bind-tty-special-chars. If non-zero,
2188 readline will bind the terminal special characters to their readline
2189 equivalents when it's called (on by default).
2191 d. New bindable command: vi-rubout. Saves deleted text for possible
2192 reinsertion, as with any vi-mode `text modification' command; `X' is bound
2193 to this in vi command mode.
2195 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2196 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-release,
2197 and the previous version, bash-3.0-rc1.
2201 a. Fixed a boundary overrun that could cause segmentation faults when the
2202 completion code hands an incomplete construct to the word expansion
2205 b. Changed posix mode behavior so that an error in a variable assignment
2206 preceding a special builtin causes a non-interactive shell to exit.
2208 c. Change the directory expansion portion of the completion code to not
2209 expand embedded command substitutions if the directory name appears in
2212 d. Fixed a problem that caused `bash -r' to turn on restrictions before
2213 reading the startup files.
2215 e. Fixed a problem with the default operation of the `umask' builtin.
2217 2. Changes to Readline
2219 a. Fixed a problem with readline saving the contents of the current line
2220 before beginning a non-interactive search.
2222 b. Fixed a problem with EOF detection when using rl_event_hook.
2224 c. Fixed a problem with the vi mode `p' and `P' commands ignoring numeric
2227 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2228 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-rc1,
2229 and the previous version, bash-3.0-beta1.
2233 a. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect behavior when referecing element 0 of
2234 an array using $array, element 0 was unset, and `set -u' was enabled.
2236 b. System-specific changes for: SCO Unix 3.2, Tandem.
2238 c. Fixed a bug that caused inappropriate word splitting when a variable was
2239 expanded within a double-quoted string that also included $@.
2241 d. Fixed a bug that caused `pwd' to not display anything in physical mode
2242 when the file system had changed underneath the shell.
2244 e. Fixed a bug in the pre- and post- increment and decrement parsing in the
2245 expression evaluator that caused errors when the operands and corresponding
2246 operators were separated by whitespace.
2248 f. Fixed a bug that caused `history -p' to add an entry to the history list,
2249 counter to the documentation. (Keeps the history expansions invoked by
2250 emacs-mode command line editing from doing that as well.)
2252 g. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if `cd' is asked to print out a
2253 pathname longer than PATH_MAX characters.
2255 h. Fixed a bug that caused jobs to be put into the wrong process group under
2256 some circumstances after enabling job control with `set -m'.
2258 i. `unalias' now returns failure if no alias name arguments are supplied.
2260 j. Documented the characters not allowed to appear in an alias name.
2262 k. $* is no longer expanded as if in double quotes when it appears in the
2263 body of a here document, as the SUS seems to require.
2265 l. The `bashbug' script now uses a directory in $TMPDIR for exclusive
2266 access rather than trying to guess how the underlying OS provides for
2267 secure temporary file creation.
2269 m. Fixed a few problems with `cd' and `pwd' when asked to operate on pathnames
2270 longer than PATH_MAX characters.
2272 n. Fixed a memory leak caused when creating multiple local array variables
2273 with identical names.
2275 o. Fixed a problem with calls to getcwd() so that bash now operates better
2276 when the full pathname to the current directory is longer than PATH_MAX
2279 p. The `trap' builtin now reports an error if a single non-signal argument
2282 q. Fixed a bug that caused `umask' to not work correctly when presented
2283 with a mask of all 0s.
2285 r. When `getopts' reaches the end of options, OPTARG is unset, as POSIX
2288 s. Interactive mode now depends on whether or not stdin and stderr are
2289 connected to a tty; formerly it was stdin and stdout. POSIX requires
2292 t. Fixed vi-mode completion to work more as POSIX specifies (e.g., doing the
2293 right kind of filename generation).
2295 2. Changes to Readline
2297 a. Fixed a problem that could cause readline to refer to freed memory when
2298 moving between history lines while doing searches.
2300 b. Improvements to the code that expands and displays prompt strings
2301 containing multibyte characters.
2303 c. Fixed a problem with vi-mode not correctly remembering the numeric argument
2304 to the last `c'hange command for later use with `.'.
2306 d. Fixed a bug in vi-mode that caused multi-digit count arguments to work
2309 e. Fixed a problem in vi-mode that caused the last text modification command
2310 to not be remembered across different command lines.
2312 f. Fixed problems with changing characters and changing case at the end of
2315 3. New Features in Bash
2317 a. The `jobs', `kill', and `wait' builtins now accept job control notation
2318 even if job control is not enabled.
2320 b. The historical behavior of `trap' that allows a missing `action' argument
2321 to cause each specified signal's handling to be reset to its default is
2322 now only supported when `trap' is given a single non-option argument.
2324 4. New Features in Readline
2326 a. When listing completions, directories have a `/' appended if the
2327 `mark-directories' option has been enabled.
2329 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2330 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-beta1,
2331 and the previous version, bash-3.0-alpha.
2335 a. Fixes to build correctly when arrays are not compiled into the shell.
2337 b. Fixed command substitution to run any exit trap defined in the command
2338 substitution before returning; the exit trap is not inherited from the
2341 c. Fixes to process group synchronization code so that every child process
2342 attempts to set the terminal's process group; fixes some synchronization
2343 problems on Linux kernels that schedule the child to always run before
2346 d. Fixed processing of octal and hex constants in printf builtin for POSIX.2
2349 e. Fixed a couple of core dumps in the pattern removal code.
2351 f. Fixes to the array subrange extraction code to deal better with sparse
2354 g. Parser errors and other errors that result in the shell exiting now cause
2355 the exit trap to be run.
2357 h. Change the command substitution completion functions to not append any
2358 closing quote, because it would be inserted a closing "`" or ")".
2360 i. Fix history initialization so assignments to $histchars made in startup
2363 j. If an exit trap does not contain a call to `exit', the shell now uses
2364 the exit status of the last command executed before the trap as the exit
2365 status of the shell.
2367 k. The parser now prompts with $PS2 if it reads a newline while parsing a
2368 compound array assignment statement.
2370 l. When performing a compound array assignment, the parser doesn't treat
2371 words of the form [index]=value as assignments if they're the result of
2374 m. Fixed a bug that caused `return' executed in a trap command to make the
2375 shell think it was still running the trap.
2377 n. Fixed the value of errno set by the pathname canonicalization functions.
2379 o. Changed the grammar so that `time' alone on a line times a null command
2380 rather than being a syntax error.
2382 p. The pattern substitution code no longer performs quote removal on the
2383 pattern before trying to match it, as the pattern removal functions do.
2385 q. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when checking whether a quoted
2386 command name was being completed.
2388 r. Fixes to the pattern removal and pattern replacement expansions to deal
2389 with multibyte characters better (and faster).
2391 s. Fix to the substring expansion (${param:off[:len]}) to deal with (possibly
2392 multibyte) characters instead of raw bytes.
2394 t. Fixed a bug that caused some key bindings set in an inputrc to be ignored
2397 u. Fixed a bug that caused unsetting a local variable within a function to
2400 v. Fixed a bug that caused invalid variables to be created when using
2403 w. Fixed a bug that caused "$@" to expand incorrectly when used as the right
2404 hand side of a parameter expansion such as ${word:="$@"} if the first
2405 character of $IFS was not a space.
2407 x. Fixed a slight cosmetic problem when printing commands containing a
2408 `>&word' redirection.
2410 y. Fixed a problem that could cause here documents to not be created correctly
2411 if the system temporary directory did not allow writing.
2413 2. Changes to Readline
2415 a. Change to history expansion functions to treat `^' as equivalent to word
2416 one, as the documention states.
2418 b. Some changes to the display code to improve display and redisplay of
2419 multibyte characters.
2421 c. Changes to speed up the multibyte character redisplay code.
2423 d. Fixed a bug in the vi-mode `E' command that caused it to skip over the
2424 last character of a word if invoked while point was on the word's
2425 next-to-last character.
2427 e. Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect filename quoting when
2428 case-insensitive completion was enabled and the word being completed
2429 contained backslashes quoting word break characters.
2431 f. Fixed a bug in redisplay triggered when the prompt string contains
2432 invisible characters.
2434 g. Fixed some display (and other) bugs encountered in multibyte locales
2435 when a non-ascii character was the last character on a line.
2437 h. Fixed some display bugs caused by multibyte characters in prompt strings.
2439 i. Fixed a problem with history expansion caused by non-whitespace characters
2440 used as history word delimiters.
2442 3. New Features in Bash
2444 a. printf builtin understands two new escape sequences: \" and \?.
2446 b. `echo -e' understands two new escape sequences: \" and \?.
2448 c. The GNU `gettext' package and libintl have been integrated; the shell's
2449 messages can be translated into different languages.
2451 d. The `\W' prompt expansion now abbreviates $HOME as `~', like `\w'.
2453 e. The error message printed when bash cannot open a shell script supplied
2454 as argument 1 now includes the name of the shell, to better identify
2455 the error as coming from bash.
2457 4. New Features in Readline
2459 a. New application variable, rl_completion_quote_character, set to any
2460 quote character readline finds before it calls the application completion
2463 b. New application variable, rl_completion_suppress_quote, settable by an
2464 application completion function. If set to non-zero, readline does not
2465 attempt to append a closing quote to a completed word.
2467 c. New application variable, rl_completion_found_quote, set to a non-zero
2468 value if readline determines that the word to be completed is quoted.
2469 Set before readline calls any application completion function.
2471 d. New function hook, rl_completion_word_break_hook, called when readline
2472 needs to break a line into words when completion is attempted. Allows
2473 the word break characters to vary based on position in the line.
2475 e. New bindable command: unix-filename-rubout. Does the same thing as
2476 unix-word-rubout, but adds `/' to the set of word delimiters.
2478 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2479 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-alpha,
2480 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-release.
2484 a. Fixes so that the shell will compile without some of the default options
2487 b. Fixed an error message that did not pass enough arguments to printf.
2489 c. Fixed a bug that caused input redirection to a builtin inside a script
2490 being read from standard input to result in the rest of the already-
2491 read and buffered script to be discarded.
2493 d. Fixed a bug that caused subshell initialization to close the file
2494 descriptor from which the shell was reading a script under certain
2497 e. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not advance a string pointer over
2498 a null wide character when doing string operations.
2500 f. Fixed the internal logout code so that shells that time out waiting for
2501 input (using $TMOUT) run ~/.bash_logout.
2503 g. Portability and configuration changes for: cygwin, HP/UX, GNU/FreeBSD.
2505 h. The parser no longer adds implicit double quotes to ((...)) arithmetic
2508 i. The ((...)) arithmetic command evaluation code was fixed to not dump core
2509 when the expanded string is null.
2511 j. The ((...)) arithmetic command evaluation code was fixed to not perform
2512 variable assignments while expanding the expression.
2514 k. Fixed a bug that caused word splitting to be performed incorrectly when
2515 IFS is set, but null.
2517 l. Fixed a bug in brace expansion that caused a quoted `$' preceding an
2518 open brace to inhibit brace expansion.
2520 m. Fixed a bug that caused a leading `-' in the shell's name to cause it to
2521 not be recognized as a restricted shell.
2523 n. Fixed a bug in the arithmetic evaluation code that could cause longjmps
2524 to an invalid location and result in a core dump.
2526 o. Fixed a bug in the calculation of how many history lines are new in a
2527 single shell session when reading new history lines from a file with
2530 p. Fixed a bug in pathname canonicalization that caused the shell to dump
2531 core when presented with a pathname longer than PATH_MAX.
2533 q. Fixed the parser so that it doesn't try to compare a char variable to
2534 EOF, which fails when chars are unsigned.
2536 r. Fixed a bug in the simple command execution code that caused occasional
2539 s. The shell does a better job of saving any partial parsing state during
2540 operations which cause a command to be executed while a line is being
2543 t. The completion code now splits words more like the expansion code when
2544 $IFS is used to split.
2546 u. The locale code does a better job of recomputing the various locale
2547 variable values when LC_ALL is unset.
2549 v. The programmable completion code does a better job of dequoting expanded
2550 word lists before comparing them against the word to be matched.
2552 w. The shell no longer seg faults if the expanded value of $PS4 is null
2553 and `set -x' is enabled.
2555 x. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when a here string expanded to NULL.
2557 y. The mail checking code now makes sure the mailbox is bigger before
2558 reporting the existence of new mail.
2560 z. The parser does not try to expand $'...' and $"..." when the appear
2561 within double quotes unless the `extquote' option has been enabled with
2562 `shopt'. For backwards compatibility, it is enabled by default.
2564 aa. Fixed a bug that caused `for x; do ...' and `select x; do ... to use
2565 $@ instead of "$@" for the implicit list of arguments.
2567 bb. Fixed a bug that caused a subshell of a restricted shell (e.g., one
2568 spawned to execute a pipeline) to not exit immediately if attempting
2569 to use a command containing a slash.
2571 cc. Fixed a problem with empty replacements for a pattern that doesn't match
2572 when performing ${param/word/} expansion.
2574 dd. Word expansions performed while expanding redirections no longer search
2575 a command's temporary environment to expand variable values.
2577 ee. Improvements to the alias expansion code when expanding subsequent words
2578 because an aliase's value ends with a space.
2580 ff. `cd -' now prints the current working directory after a successful chdir
2581 even when the shell is not interactive, as the standard requires.
2583 gg. The shell does a better job of ensuring a child process dies of SIGINT
2584 before resending SIGINT to itself.
2586 hh. The arithmetic expansion variable assignment code now does the right
2587 thing when assigning to `special' variables like OPTIND.
2589 ii. When history expansion verification is enabled, the bash readline helper
2590 functions that do history expansion on the current line don't print
2593 jj. Fixed bugs with multiple consecutive alias expansion when one of the
2594 expansions ends with a space.
2596 kk. Fixed a problem in the programmable completion code that could cause core
2597 dumps when trying to initialize a set of possible completions from a
2600 ll. The \[ and \] escape characters are now ignored when decoding the prompt
2601 string if the shell is started with editing disabled.
2603 mm. Fixed a bug that could leave extra characters in a string when doing
2604 quoted null character removal.
2606 nn. Command substitution and other subshell operations no longer reset the
2607 line number (aids the bash debugger).
2609 oo. Better line number management when executing simple commands, conditional
2610 commands, for commands, and select commands.
2612 pp. The globbing code now uses malloc, with its better failure properties,
2613 rather than alloca().
2615 qq. Fixed a bug that caused expansions like #{a[2]:=value} to create the
2616 appropriate array element instead of a variable named `a[2]'.
2618 rr. Fixed a bug in the handling of a `?(...)' pattern immediately following
2619 a `*' when extglob is enabled.
2621 ss. Fixed a bug that caused a `return' invoked in an exit trap when exit is
2622 invoked in a function to misbehave.
2624 tt. Fixed a bug that caused CTLESC and CTLNUL characters to not be escaped
2625 by the internal shell string quoting functions.
2627 uu. Fixed a bug that caused quoted null characters in an expanded word list
2628 to be inappropriately assigned to an array variable when using `read -a'.
2630 vv. Fixed a bug that caused redirections accompanying a null command to persist
2631 in the current shell.
2633 ww. Fixed a bug that caused the prompt to be printed when the shell was
2634 expanding a multiline alias.
2636 xx. Fixed a bug that resulted in core dumps when the completion for a command
2637 changed the compspec.
2639 yy. Fixed a bug that caused evaluation of programmable completions to print
2640 notifications of completed jobs.
2642 zz. Bash now disables line editing when $EMACS == `t' and $TERM == `dumb'
2643 (which is what emacs shell windows do).
2645 aaa. In posix mode, `kill -l' causes signal names to be displayed without
2648 bbb. Clear error flag on standard output so it doesn't persist across multiple
2651 ccc. In posix mode, `alias' displays alias values without the leading `alias',
2652 so the output cannot be used as subsequent input.
2654 ddd. In posix mode, the `trap' builtin doesn't check whether or not its
2655 first argument is a signal specification and revert the signal handling
2656 to its original disposition if it is.
2658 eee. Fixed several bugs in the handling of "$*" and "${array[*]}" by the
2659 pattern substitution and removal expansions.
2661 fff. Fixed several problems with the handling of ${array[@]}, ${array[*]},
2662 $@, and $* by the indirect variable expansion code.
2664 ggg. Fixed a bug that did not allow `time' to be aliased.
2666 hhh. Improved the mail checking code so it won't check (and possibly cause an
2667 NFS file system mount) until MAILPATH or MAIL is given a value -- there
2668 is no default if DEFAULT_MAIL_DIRECTORY is not defined at compile time.
2669 (It is computed by configure, but can be #undef'd in config-bot.h.)
2671 iii. If the `chkwinsize' option is enabled, the shell checks for window size
2672 changes if a child process exits due to a signal.
2674 jjj. Removed the attempts to avoid adding a slash at the end of a completed
2675 executable name if there was a directory with the same name in the
2678 kkk. Fixed PATH lookup code so it treats the permission bits separately for
2679 owner, group, and other, rather than checking them all.
2681 lll. Fixed the locale code to reset the parser's idea of the character class
2682 <blank>, which controls how it splits tokens, when the locale changes.
2684 mmm. The shell now binds its special readline functions and key bindings only
2685 if the user's inputrc file has not already bound them.
2687 nnn. The shell now reports on processes that dump core due to signals when
2688 invoked as `-c command'.
2690 2. Changes to Readline
2692 a. Fixes to avoid core dumps because of null pointer references in the
2693 multibyte character code.
2695 b. Fix to avoid infinite recursion caused by certain key combinations.
2697 c. Fixed a bug that caused the vi-mode `last command' to be set incorrectly.
2699 d. Readline no longer tries to read ahead more than one line of input, even
2700 when more is available.
2702 e. Fixed the code that adjusts the point to not mishandle null wide
2705 f. Fixed a bug in the history expansion `g' modifier that caused it to skip
2708 g. Fixed a bug that caused the prompt to overwrite previous output when the
2709 output doesn't contain a newline and the locale supports multibyte
2710 characters. This same change fixes the problem of readline redisplay
2711 slowing down dramatically as the line gets longer in multibyte locales.
2713 h. History traversal with arrow keys in vi insertion mode causes the cursor
2714 to be placed at the end of the new line, like in emacs mode.
2716 i. The locale initialization code does a better job of using the right
2717 precedence and defaulting when checking the appropriate environment
2720 j. Fixed the history word tokenizer to handle <( and >( better when used as
2723 k. The overwrite mode code received several bug fixes to improve undo.
2725 l. Many speedups to the multibyte character redisplay code.
2727 m. The callback character reading interface should not hang waiting to read
2730 n. Fixed a bug with redoing vi-mode `s' command.
2732 o. The code that initializes the terminal tracks changes made to the terminal
2733 special characters with stty(1) (or equivalent), so that these changes
2734 are reflected in the readline bindings. New application-callable function
2735 to make it work: rl_tty_unset_default_bindings().
2737 p. Fixed a bug that could cause garbage to be inserted in the buffer when
2738 changing character case in vi mode when using a multibyte locale.
2740 q. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code that caused problems on systems
2741 supporting multibyte characters when moving between history lines when the
2742 new line has more glyphs but fewer bytes.
2744 r. Undo and redo now work better after exiting vi insertion mode.
2746 s. Make sure system calls are restarted after a SIGWINCH is received using
2749 t. Improvements to the code that displays possible completions when using
2750 multibyte characters.
2752 u. Fixed a problem when parsing nested if statements in inputrc files.
2754 v. The completer now takes multibyte characters into account when looking for
2755 quoted substrings on which to perform completion.
2757 w. The history search functions now perform better bounds checking on the
2760 3. New Features in Bash
2762 a. ANSI string expansion now implements the \x{hexdigits} escape.
2764 b. There is a new loadable `strftime' builtin.
2766 c. New variable, COMP_WORDBREAKS, which controls the readline completer's
2767 idea of word break characters.
2769 d. The `type' builtin no longer reports on aliases unless alias expansion
2770 will actually be performed.
2772 e. HISTCONTROL is now a colon-separated list of values, which permits
2773 more extensibility and backwards compatibility.
2775 f. HISTCONTROL may now include the `erasedups' option, which causes all lines
2776 matching a line being added to be removed from the history list.
2778 g. `configure' has a new `--enable-multibyte' argument that permits multibyte
2779 character support to be disabled even on systems that support it.
2781 h. New variables to support the bash debugger: BASH_ARGC, BASH_ARGV,
2782 BASH_SOURCE, BASH_LINENO, BASH_SUBSHELL, BASH_EXECUTION_STRING,
2785 i. FUNCNAME has been changed to support the debugger: it's now an array
2788 j. for, case, select, arithmetic commands now keep line number information
2791 k. There is a new `RETURN' trap executed when a function or sourced script
2792 returns (not inherited child processes; inherited by command substitution
2793 if function tracing is enabled and the debugger is active).
2795 l. New invocation option: --debugger. Enables debugging and turns on new
2796 `extdebug' shell option.
2798 m. New `functrace' and `errtrace' options to `set -o' cause DEBUG and ERR
2799 traps, respectively, to be inherited by shell functions. Equivalent to
2800 `set -T' and `set -E' respectively. The `functrace' option also controls
2801 whether or not the DEBUG trap is inherited by sourced scripts.
2803 n. The DEBUG trap is run before binding the variable and running the action
2804 list in a `for' command, binding the selection variable and running the
2805 query in a `select' command, and before attempting a match in a `case'
2808 o. New `--enable-debugger' option to `configure' to compile in the debugger
2811 p. `declare -F' now prints out extra line number and source file information
2812 if the `extdebug' option is set.
2814 q. If `extdebug' is enabled, a non-zero return value from a DEBUG trap causes
2815 the next command to be skipped, and a return value of 2 while in a
2816 function or sourced script forces a `return'.
2818 r. New `caller' builtin to provide a call stack for the bash debugger.
2820 s. The DEBUG trap is run just before the first command in a function body is
2821 executed, for the debugger.
2823 t. `for', `select', and `case' command heads are printed when `set -x' is
2826 u. There is a new {x..y} brace expansion, which is shorthand for {x.x+1,
2827 x+2,...,y}. x and y can be integers or single characters; the sequence
2828 may ascend or descend; the increment is always 1.
2830 v. New ksh93-like ${!array[@]} expansion, expands to all the keys (indices)
2833 w. New `force_fignore' shopt option; if enabled, suffixes specified by
2834 FIGNORE cause words to be ignored when performing word completion even
2835 if they're the only possibilities.
2837 x. New `gnu_errfmt' shopt option; if enabled, error messages follow the `gnu
2838 style' (filename:lineno:message) format.
2840 y. New `-o bashdefault' option to complete and compgen; if set, causes the
2841 whole set of bash completions to be performed if the compspec doesn't
2844 z. New `-o plusdirs' option to complete and compgen; if set, causes directory
2845 name completion to be performed and the results added to the rest of the
2846 possible completions.
2848 aa. `kill' is available as a builtin even when the shell is built without
2851 bb. New HISTTIMEFORMAT variable; value is a format string to pass to
2852 strftime(3). If set and not null, the `history' builtin prints out
2853 timestamp information according to the specified format when displaying
2854 history entries. If set, bash tells the history library to write out
2855 timestamp information when the history file is written.
2857 cc. The [[ ... ]] command has a new binary `=~' operator that performs
2858 extended regular expression (egrep-like) matching.
2860 dd. `configure' has a new `--enable-cond-regexp' option (enabled by default)
2861 to enable the =~ operator and regexp matching in [[ ... ]].
2863 ee. Subexpressions matched by the =~ operator are placed in the new
2864 BASH_REMATCH array variable.
2866 ff. New `failglob' option that causes an expansion error when pathname
2867 expansion fails to produce a match.
2869 gg. New `set -o pipefail' option that causes a pipeline to return a failure
2870 status if any of the processes in the pipeline fail, not just the last
2873 4. New Features in Readline
2875 a. History expansion has a new `a' modifier equivalent to the `g' modifier
2876 for compatibility with the BSD csh.
2878 b. History expansion has a new `G' modifier equivalent to the BSD csh `g'
2879 modifier, which performs a substitution once per word.
2881 c. All non-incremental search operations may now undo the operation of
2882 replacing the current line with the history line.
2884 d. The text inserted by an `a' command in vi mode can be reinserted with
2887 e. New bindable variable, `show-all-if-unmodified'. If set, the readline
2888 completer will list possible completions immediately if there is more
2889 than one completion and partial completion cannot be performed.
2891 f. There is a new application-callable `free_history_entry()' function.
2893 g. History list entries now contain timestamp information; the history file
2894 functions know how to read and write timestamp information associated
2897 h. Four new key binding functions have been added:
2899 rl_bind_key_if_unbound()
2900 rl_bind_key_if_unbound_in_map()
2901 rl_bind_keyseq_if_unbound()
2902 rl_bind_keyseq_if_unbound_in_map()
2904 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2905 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-release,
2906 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-beta2.
2910 a. Fixed an off-by-one error in the function that translates job
2913 b. Note that we're running under Emacs and disable line editing if
2916 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2917 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-beta2,
2918 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-beta1.
2922 a. Fixed the /= and %= arithmetic operators to catch division by zero.
2924 b. Added putenv, setenv, unsetenv to getenv replacement for completeness.
2926 c. Fixed a bug that could cause the -O expand_aliases invocation option
2929 d. Fixed a problem with process substitution that resulted in incorrect
2930 behavior when the number of process substitutions in an individual
2931 command approached 64.
2933 2. Changes to Readline
2935 a. Fixed a problem with backward-char-search when on a system with support
2936 for multibyte characters when running in a locale without any multibyte
2939 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2940 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-beta1,
2941 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-alpha1.
2945 a. Fixed a problem when parsing a POSIX.2 character class name while
2946 evaluating a bracket expression containing multibyte characters.
2948 b. Changed the help text for `bind' to make it clear that any command
2949 that may be placed in ~/.inputrc is a valid argument to `bind'.
2951 c. Added `help' builtin entries for `((', `[[', and arithmetic for.
2953 d. malloc updated again:
2954 o slightly better overflow and underflow detection by putting the
2955 chunk size at the beginning and end of the chunk and making
2956 sure they match in free/realloc
2957 o partial page allocated to make things page-aligned no longer
2959 o block coalescing now enabled by default
2960 o splitting and coalescing enabled for 32-byte chunks, the most
2961 common size requested
2962 o fixed a problem that resulted in spurious underflow messages and
2964 o bin sizes are precomputed and stored in an array rather than
2965 being computed at run time
2966 o malloc will return memory blocks back to the system if the block
2967 being freed is at the top of the heap and of sufficient size to
2969 o malloc/free/realloc now inline memset instead of calling the
2970 libc function; uses Duff's device for good performance
2972 e. Check for getservent(); make the service name completion code dependent
2975 f. Changed the readline callback that executes a command bound to a key
2976 sequence to not save the executed command on the history list and to
2977 save and restore the parsing state.
2979 g. Changes to lib/sh/snprintf.c: fixed some bugs in the `g' and `G'
2980 floating point format display; implemented the "'" flag character
2981 that turns on thousands' grouping; fixed behavior on systems where
2982 MB_CUR_MAX does not evaluate to a constant.
2984 h. The `unset' builtin no longer returns a failure status when asked to
2985 unset a previously-unset variable or function.
2987 i. Changes to the build system to make it easier to cross-compile bash
2988 for different systems.
2990 j. Added `,' to the characters that are backslash-escaped during filename
2991 completion, to avoid problems with complete-into-braces and RCS filenames
2994 k. Some changes to the multibyte character support code to avoid many calls
2997 l. Bash now correctly honors setting LANG to some value when LC_ALL does not
2998 already have a value.
3000 m. Fixed a bug that could cause SIGSEGV when processing nested traps with
3003 n. The `source/.' builtin now restores the positional parameters when it
3004 returns unless they were changed using the `set' builtin during the file's
3007 o. Fixed a bug that caused a syntax error when a command was terminated by
3010 2. New Features in Bash
3012 a. There is now support for placing the long help text into separate files
3013 installed into ${datadir}/bash. Not enabled by default; can be turned
3014 on with `--enable-separate-helpfiles' option to configure.
3016 b. All builtins that take operands accept a `--' pseudo-option, except
3019 c. The `echo' builtin now accepts \0xxx (zero to three octal digits following
3020 the `0') in addition to \xxx (one to three octal digits) for SUSv3/XPG6/
3021 POSIX.1-2001 compliance.
3023 3. Changes to Readline
3025 a. Fixed a small problem in _rl_insert_char with multibyte characters.
3027 b. Fixes from IBM for line wrapping problems when using multibyte characters.
3029 c. Fixed a problem which caused the display to be messed up when the last
3030 line of a multi-line prompt (possibly containing invisible characters)
3031 was longer than the screen width.
3033 d. Fixed a problem with the vi-mode `r' command that ocurred on systems with
3034 support for multibyte characters when running in a locale without any
3035 multibyte characters.
3037 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3038 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-alpha1,
3039 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-release.
3043 a. Some changes to work around inlining differences between compilers.
3045 b. Added more prototypes for internal shell typedefs, to catch argument
3046 passing errors when using pointers to functions.
3048 c. The `cd' builtin now fails in posix mode when a valid directory cannot be
3049 constructed from a relative pathname argument and the $PWD using pathname
3050 canonicalization, and the -P option has not been supplied. Previously,
3051 the shell would attempt to use what the user typed, leading to weird
3052 values for $PWD and discrepancies between the value of $PWD and the
3053 actual working directory.
3055 d. The `cd' builtin now resets $PWD when canonicalization fails but a chdir
3056 to the pathname passed as an argument succeeds (when not in posix mode).
3058 e. The `fc' builtin has been fixed, as POSIX requires, to use the closest
3059 history position in range when given an out-of-range argument.
3061 f. The history file loading code was changed to allow lines to be saved in
3062 the history list from the shell startup files.
3064 g. `history -s args' now works better in compound commands.
3066 h. The tilde expansion code was fixed to better recognize when it's being
3067 invoked in an assignment context, which enables expansion after `='
3070 i. Fixed the command name completion code so a slash is no longer appended
3071 to a single match if there happens to be a directory with that name in
3074 j. Fixed compound array assignment to no longer perform alias expansion, to
3075 allow reserved words as array members, and to not produce extra output
3076 when the `-v' option had been enabled.
3078 k. Fixed the programmable completion code to better handle newlines in lists
3079 of possible completions (e.g., `complete -W').
3081 l. Removed the reserved words from the `bash-builtins' manual page.
3083 m. Parser error reporting now attempts to do a better job of identifying the
3084 token in error rather than doing straight textual analysis.
3086 n. Fixes for Inf/NaN, locales, wide/multibyte characters and zero-length
3087 arguments in the library snprintf(3) replacement.
3089 o. `read -e' no longer does command name completion on the first word on
3090 the line being read.
3092 p. `select' now returns failure if the read of the user's selection fails.
3094 q. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when setting $PIPESTATUS.
3096 r. Fixes to not allocate so many job slots when the shell is running a loop
3097 with job control enabled in a subshell of an interactive shell.
3099 s. Fixed a bug in the trap code that caused traps to be inherited by
3100 command substitutions in some cases.
3102 t. Fixed a bug that could cause alias expansion to inappropriately expand
3103 the word following the alias.
3105 u. Fixed a bug in the `kill' builtin that mishandled negative pid arguments.
3107 v. The parser is less lenient when parsing assignment statements where the
3108 characters before the `=' don't comprise a valid identifier.
3110 w. The arithmetic expression evaluation code now honors the setting of the
3111 `-u' option when expanding variable names.
3113 x. Fixed the arithmetic evaluation code to allow array subscripts to be
3114 assigned (`let b[7]=42') and auto-incremented and auto-decremented
3117 y. Reimplemented the existing prompt string date and time expansions using
3118 strftime(3), which changed the output of \@ in some locales.
3120 z. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when a special shell variable
3121 (like RANDOM) was converted to an array with a variable assignment.
3123 aa. Fixed a bug that would reset the handler for a signal the user had
3124 trapped to a function that would exit the shell when setting the exit
3125 trap in a non-interactive shell.
3127 bb. Changed the execve(2) wrapper code to check whether or not a failing
3128 command is a directory before looking at whether a `#!' interpreter
3129 failed for some reason.
3131 cc. Fixed a bug in the command printing code so it no longer inserts a `;'
3132 after a newline, which produces a syntax error when reused as input.
3134 dd. The code that expands $PS4 no longer inherits the `-x' flag.
3136 ee. The bash-specific completion functions may now take advantage of the
3137 double-TAB and M-? features of the standard readline completion
3140 ff. The mail checking code no longer prints a message if the checked file's
3141 size has not increased, even if the access time is less than the modification time.
3143 gg. Rewrote the variable symbol table code: there is now a stack of
3144 contexts, each possibly including a separate symbol table; there can
3145 be more than one temporary environment supplied to nested invocations
3146 of `./source'; the temporary environments no longer require so much
3147 special-case code; shell functions now handle the temporary environment
3148 and local variables more consistently; function scope exit is faster now
3149 that the entire symbol table does not have to be traversed to dispose of
3150 local variables; it is now easier to push vars from the temporary
3151 environment to the shell's variable table in posix mode; some duplicated
3152 code has been removed.
3154 hh. Regularized the error message printing code; builtin_error is now called
3155 more consistently, and common error message strings are handled by small
3156 functions. This should make eventual message translation easier.
3158 ii. Error messages now include the line number in a script when the shell
3161 jj. Array subscript expansion now takes place even when the array variable is
3162 unset, so side effects will take place.
3164 kk. Fixed a bug in the SICGHLD child-reaping code so that it won't find
3165 jobs already marked as terminated if the OS reuses pids quickly enough.
3167 ll. Fixed a bug that could cause a signal to not interrupt the `wait'
3168 builtin while it was waiting for a background process to terminate.
3170 mm. A couple of changes to make it easier for multiple shells to share history
3171 files using `history -n', `history -r', and `history -w'.
3173 nn. The `getopts' builtin always increments OPTIND to point to the next
3174 option to be handled when an option is returned, whether it's valid
3175 or not, as POSIX 1003.x-2001 requires.
3177 oo. Changed some parts of the expansion code to avoid allocating and
3178 immediately freeing memory without using the results for anything.
3180 pp. The shell now keeps track of $IFS internally, updating its internal map
3181 each time the variable is assigned a new value (or at local scope exit).
3182 This saves thousands of hash lookups for IFS, which, while individually
3185 qq. Rewrote the hash table code: searching and insertion are much faster now,
3186 and it uses a better string hashing function; augmented the function
3187 interface to simplify other parts of the code and remove duplicated code
3189 rr. The shell now uses a simple, generic `object cache' for allocating and
3190 caching words and word lists, which were the major users of
3193 ss. Fixed the assignment statement parsing code to allow whitespace and
3194 newlines in subscripts when performing array element assignment.
3196 tt. The shell now issues many fewer calls to sigprocmask and other signal
3197 masking system calls.
3199 uu. Fixed the `test' and conditional command file comparison operators to
3200 work right when one file has a non-positive timestamp and the other
3203 vv. Fixed some cases where the special characters '\001' and '\177' in the
3204 values of variables or positional parameters caused incorrect expansion
3207 2. Changes to Readline
3209 a. Fixed output of comment-begin character when listing variable values.
3211 b. Added some default key bindings for common escape sequences produced by
3214 c. Fixed the mark handling code to be more emacs-compatible.
3216 d. A bug was fixed in the code that prints possible completions to keep it
3217 from printing empty strings in certain circumstances.
3219 e. Change the key sequence printing code to print ESC as M\- if ESC is a
3220 meta-prefix character -- it's easier for users to understand than \e.
3222 f. Fixed unstifle_history() to return values that match the documentation.
3224 g. Fixed the event loop (rl_event_hook) to handle the case where the input
3225 file descriptor is invalidated.
3227 h. Fixed the prompt display code to work better when the application has a
3228 custom redisplay function.
3230 i. Changes to make reading and writing the history file a little faster, and
3231 to cope with huge history files without calling abort(3) from xmalloc.
3233 j. The vi-mode `S' and `s' commands are now undone correctly.
3235 3. New Features in Bash
3237 a. If set, TMOUT is the default timeout for the `read' builtin.
3239 b. `type' has two new options: `-f' suppresses shell function lookup, and
3240 `-P' forces a $PATH search.
3242 c. New code to handle multibyte characters.
3244 d. `select' was changed to be more ksh-compatible, in that the menu is
3245 reprinted each time through the loop only if REPLY is set to NULL.
3246 The previous behavior is available as a compile-time option.
3248 e. `complete -d' and `complete -o dirnames' now force a slash to be
3249 appended to names which are symlinks to directories.
3251 f. There is now a bindable edit-and-execute-command readline command,
3252 like the vi-mode `v' command, bound to C-xC-e in emacs mode.
3254 g. Added support for ksh93-like [:word:] character class in pattern matching.
3256 h. The $'...' quoting construct now expands \cX to Control-X.
3258 i. A new \D{...} prompt expansion; passes the `...' to strftime and inserts
3259 the result into the expanded prompt.
3261 j. The shell now performs arithmetic in the largest integer size the
3262 machine supports (intmax_t), instead of long.
3264 k. If a numeric argument is supplied to one of the bash globbing completion
3265 functions, a `*' is appended to the word before expansion is attempted.
3267 l. The bash globbing completion functions now allow completions to be listed
3268 with double tabs or if `show-all-if-ambiguous' is set.
3270 m. New `-o nospace' option for `complete' and `compgen' builtins; suppresses
3271 readline's appending a space to the completed word.
3273 n. New `here-string' redirection operator: <<< word.
3275 o. When displaying variables, function attributes and definitions are shown
3276 separately, allowing them to be re-used as input (attempting to re-use
3277 the old output would result in syntax errors).
3279 p. There is a new configuration option `--enable-mem-scramble', controls
3280 bash malloc behavior of writing garbage characters into memory at
3281 allocation and free time.
3283 q. The `complete' and `compgen' builtins now have a new `-s/-A service'
3284 option to complete on names from /etc/services.
3286 r. `read' has a new `-u fd' option to read from a specified file descriptor.
3288 s. Fix the completion code so that expansion errors in a directory name
3289 don't cause a longjmp back to the command loop.
3291 t. Fixed word completion inside command substitution to work a little more
3294 u. The `printf' %q format specifier now uses $'...' quoting to print the
3295 argument if it contains non-printing characters.
3297 v. The `declare' and `typeset' builtins have a new `-t' option. When applied
3298 to functions, it causes the DEBUG trap to be inherited by the named
3299 function. Currently has no effect on variables.
3301 w. The DEBUG trap is now run *before* simple commands, ((...)) commands,
3302 [[...]] conditional commands, and for ((...)) loops.
3304 x. The expansion of $LINENO inside a shell function is only relative to the
3305 function start if the shell is interactive -- if the shell is running a
3306 script, $LINENO expands to the line number in the script. This is as
3307 POSIX-2001 requires.
3309 y. The bash debugger in examples/bashdb has been modified to work with the
3310 new DEBUG trap semantics, the command set has been made more gdb-like,
3311 and the changes to $LINENO make debugging functions work better. Code
3314 z. New [n]<&word- and [n]>&word- redirections from ksh93 -- move fds (dup
3317 aa. There is a new `-l' invocation option, equivalent to `--login'.
3319 bb. The `hash' builtin has a new `-l' option to list contents in a reusable
3320 format, and a `-d' option to remove a name from the hash table.
3322 4. New Features in Readline
3324 a. Support for key `subsequences': allows, e.g., ESC and ESC-a to both
3325 be bound to readline functions. Now the arrow keys may be used in vi
3328 b. When listing completions, and the number of lines displayed is more than
3329 the screen length, readline uses an internal pager to display the results.
3330 This is controlled by the `page-completions' variable (default on).
3332 c. New code to handle editing and displaying multibyte characters.
3334 d. The behavior introduced in bash-2.05a of deciding whether or not to
3335 append a slash to a completed name that is a symlink to a directory has
3336 been made optional, controlled by the `mark-symlinked-directories'
3337 variable (default is the 2.05a behavior).
3339 e. The `insert-comment' command now acts as a toggle if given a numeric
3340 argument: if the first characters on the line don't specify a
3341 comment, insert one; if they do, delete the comment text
3343 f. New application-settable completion variable:
3344 rl_completion_mark_symlink_dirs, allows an application's completion
3345 function to temporarily override the user's preference for appending
3346 slashes to names which are symlinks to directories.
3348 g. New function available to application completion functions:
3349 rl_completion_mode, to tell how the completion function was invoked
3350 and decide which argument to supply to rl_complete_internal (to list
3353 h. Readline now has an overwrite mode, toggled by the `overwrite-mode'
3354 bindable command, which could be bound to `Insert'.
3356 i. New application-settable completion variable:
3357 rl_completion_suppress_append, inhibits appending of
3358 rl_completion_append_character to completed words.
3360 j. New key bindings when reading an incremental search string: ^W yanks
3361 the currently-matched word out of the current line into the search
3362 string; ^Y yanks the rest of the current line into the search string,
3363 DEL or ^H deletes characters from the search string.
3365 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3366 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-release,
3367 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-rc1.
3371 a. Fixed the `printf' builtin so that the variable name supplied as an
3372 argument to a %n conversion must be a valid shell identifier.
3374 b. Improved the random number generator slightly.
3376 c. Changes to configuration to not put -I/usr/include into $CFLAGS, since
3377 it messes up some includes.
3379 d. Corrected description of POSIXLY_CORRECT in man page and info manual.
3381 e. Fixed a couple of cases of incorrect function prototypes that sneaked
3382 through and caused compilation problems.
3384 f. A few changes to avoid potential core dumps in the programmable completion
3387 g. Fixed a configure problem that could cause a non-existent file to show
3390 h. Fixed a configure problem that could cause siglist.o to not be built when
3393 i. Changes to the strtoimax and strtoumax replacement functions to work
3394 around buggy compilers.
3396 j. Fixed a problem with the snprintf replacement function that could
3397 potentially cause a core dump.
3399 2. Changes to Readline
3401 a. Fixed a locale-specific problem in the vi-mode `goto mark' command.
3403 b. Fixed Makefile to not put -I/usr/include into CFLAGS, since it can cause
3404 include file problems.
3406 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3407 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-rc1,
3408 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-beta1.
3412 a. Fixed the snprintf replacement to correctly implement the `alternate form'
3413 of the %g and %G conversions.
3415 b. Fixed snprintf to correctly handle the optional precision with the %g and
3418 c. Fixed the arithmetic evaluation code to correct the values of `@' and `_'
3419 when translating base-64 constants (they were backwards).
3421 d. New library functions for formatting long and long long ints.
3423 e. Fixed a few places where negative array subscripts could have occurred,
3424 mostly as the result of systems using signed characters.
3426 f. Fixed a few places that assumed a pid_t was no wider than an int.
3428 g. Fixed the `maildir' mail checking code to work on systems where a
3429 `struct stat' doesn't include an `st_blocks' member.
3431 h. Fixed snprintf to make `unsigned long long' conversion formats (%llu)
3434 i. Fixed snprintf to not print a sign when asked to do an unsigned conversion.
3436 j. Made configure changes to avoid compiling empty source files in lib/sh.
3438 k. New replacement functions (if necessary) for strtoull, strtoll, strtoimax,
3441 l. The `printf' builtin now handles the `ll' and `j' length modifiers
3442 directly, since they can affect the type and width of the argument
3443 passed to printf(3).
3445 m. Renamed a number of the bash-specific autoconf macros in aclocal.m4 to
3446 have more sytematic naming, with accompanying changes to configure.in.
3448 n. Fixed snprintf to handle long doubles and the %a/%A conversions by
3449 falling back to sprintf, as long as sprintf supports them.
3451 o. Fixed return value from vsnprintf/snprintf to be the number of characters
3452 that would have been printed, even if that number exceeds the buffer
3453 size passed as an argument.
3455 p. Bash no longer attempts to define its own versions of some ctype macros
3456 if they are implemented as functions in libc but not as macros in
3459 q. Changed the variable printing code (used by `set', `export', etc.) to
3460 not use the $'...' syntax when in posix mode, since that caused
3461 interoperability problems with other shells (most notably with autoconf).
3462 When not in posix mode, it uses $'...' if the string to be printed
3463 contains non-printing characters and regular single quotes otherwise.
3465 r. snprintf now recognizes the %F conversion.
3467 s. Fixed a bug that could cause the wrong status to be returned by a shell
3468 function when the shell is compiled without job control and a null
3469 command containing a command substutition was executed in the function.
3471 t. When in posix mode, the default value for MAILCHECK is 600.
3473 u. Bash only initializes FUNCNAME, GROUPS, and DIRSTACK as special variables
3474 if they're not in the initial environment.
3476 v. If SECONDS appears in the initial environment with a valid integer value,
3477 bash uses that as the starting value, as if an assignment had been
3480 w. Bash no longer auto-exports HOME, PATH, SHELL, or TERM, even though it
3481 gives them default values if they don't appear in the initial environment.
3483 x. Bash no longer auto-exports HOSTNAME, HOSTTYPE, MACHTYPE, or OSTYPE,
3484 even if it assigns them default values.
3486 y. Bash no longer removes the export attribute from SSH_CLIENT or SSH2_CLIENT
3487 if they appear in the initial environment.
3489 z. Bash no longer attempts to discover if it's being run by sshd in order to
3490 run the startup files. If the SSH_SOURCE_BASHRC is uncommented in
3491 config-top.h it will attempt to do so as previously, but that's commented
3492 out in the distributed version.
3494 aa. Fixed a typo in the code that tests for LC_NUMERIC.
3496 bb. The POSIXLY_CORRECT shell variable and its effects are now documented.
3498 cc. Some changes to several of the support shell scripts included in the
3499 definitions to try to avoid race conditions and attacks.
3501 dd. Several changes to avoid warnings from `gcc -Wall'.
3503 ee. Fixed a problem with the `unset' builtin that could cause incorrect
3504 results if asked to unset a variable and an array subscript in the
3507 ff. A few changes to the shell's temporary file creation code to avoid
3508 potential file descriptor leaks and to prefer the system's idea of
3509 the temporary directory to use.
3511 gg. Fixes to build with the C alloca in lib/malloc/alloca.c if the system
3512 requires it but the shell has been configured --without-bash-malloc.
3514 hh. Updated the documentation to note that only interactive shells resend
3515 SIGHUP to all jobs before exiting.
3517 ii. Fixes to only pass unquoted tilde words to tilde_expand, rather than
3518 rely on tilde_expand or getpwnam(3) to handle the quotes (MacOS 10.x
3519 will remove backslashes in any login name passed to getpwnam(3)).
3521 jj. Small change from Paul Eggert to make LINENO right in commands run with
3524 2. New Features in Bash
3526 a. The `printf' builtin now handles the %a and %A conversions if they're
3527 implemented by printf(3).
3529 b. The `printf' builtin now handles the %F conversion (just about like %f).
3531 c. The `printf' builtin now handles the %n conversion like printf(3). The
3532 corresponding argument is the name of a shell variable to which the
3535 3. Changes to Readline
3537 a. Fixed a few places where negative array subscripts could have occurred.
3539 b. Fixed the vi-mode code to use a better method to determine the bounds of
3540 the array used to hold the marks.
3542 c. Fixed the defines in chardefs.h to work better when chars are signed.
3544 d. Fixed configure.in to use the new names for bash autoconf macros.
3546 e. Readline no longer attempts to define its own versions of some ctype
3547 macros if they are implemented as functions in libc but not as macros in
3550 f. Fixed a problem where rl_backward could possibly set point to before
3551 the beginning of the line.
3553 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3554 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-beta1,
3555 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-alpha1.
3559 a. Fixed a bug in the evalution of arithmetic `for' statements when the
3560 expanded expression is NULL.
3562 b. Fixed an unassigned variable problem in the redirection printing code.
3564 c. Added more prototypes to extern function declarations in the header
3565 files and to static function declarations in C source files.
3567 d. Make sure called functions have a prototype in scope, to get the arguments
3568 and return values right instead of casting. Removed extern function
3569 declarations from C source files that were already included in header
3572 e. Changed some function arguments to use function typedefs in general.h so
3573 the prototypes can be checked. The only use of Function and VFunction
3574 now is for unwind-protects.
3576 f. More const changes to function arguments and appropriate variables.
3578 g. Changed the mail checking support to handle `maildir'-style mail
3581 h. Augmented the bash malloc to pass in the file and line number information
3582 for each malloc, realloc, and free. This should result in better error
3585 i. The `old' gnu malloc is no longer a configuration option.
3587 j. Augmented the bash malloc with optional tracing and registering allocated
3590 k. Prompt string decoding now saves and restores the value of $? when it
3591 expands the prompt string, so command substitutions don't change $?.
3593 i. Array indices are now `long', since shell arithmetic is performed as long,
3594 and the internal arrayind_t type is used consistently.
3596 j. Some more `unsigned char *' fixes from Paul Eggert.
3598 k. Fixed a bad call to builtin_error that could cause core dumps when making
3601 l. `return' may no longer be used to terminate a `select' command, for
3602 compatibility with ksh.
3604 m. Changed code that reads octal numbers to do a better job of detecting
3607 n. The time formatting code no longer uses absolute indices into a buffer,
3608 because the buffer size changes depending on the size of a `time_t'.
3610 o. `umask' now prints four digits when printing in octal mode, for
3611 compatibility with other shells.
3613 p. Lots of changes to the `printf' builtin from Paul Eggert: it handles `L'
3614 formats and long doubles better, and internal functions have been
3615 simpified where appropriate.
3617 q. Some `time_t' fixes for machines were a time_t is bigger than a long.
3619 r. Replaced some bash-specific autoconf macros with standard equivalents.
3621 s. Improvmed the code that constructs temporary filenames to make the
3622 generated names a bit more random.
3624 t. Added code that checks for ascii before calling any of the is* ctype
3627 u. Changed some places where a `char' was used as an array subscript to use
3628 `unsigned char', since a `char' can be negative if it's signed by default.
3630 v. Lots of changes to the `ulimit' builtin from Paul Eggert to add support
3631 for the new POSIX-200x RLIM_SAVED_CUR and RLIM_SAVED_MAX values and
3634 w. `ulimit' now prints the description of a resource in any error message
3635 relating to fetching or setting that resource's limits.
3637 x. The `snprintf' replacement now computes maximum values at compile
3638 time rather than using huge constants for things like long long.
3640 y. Interactive shells now ignore `set -n'.
3642 z. Changed the malloc bookkeeping information so that it's now 8 bytes
3643 instead of 12 on most 32-bit machines (saving 4 bytes per allocation),
3644 restoring 8-byte alignment.
3646 aa. The malloc error reporting code now attempts to print the file and line
3647 number of the call that caused the error.
3649 bb. Changed the redirection error reporting code to catch EBADF errors and
3650 report the file descriptor number rather than the file being redirected
3651 to or from (e.g., things like `exec 4242<x' where 4242 is an out-of-range
3654 cc. `printf', `echo -e', and the $'...' code now process only two hex digits
3655 after a `\x' escape sequence for compatibility with other shells, and
3656 the documentation was changed to note that the octal and hex escape
3657 sequences result in an eight-bit value rather than strict ASCII.
3659 2. Changes to Readline
3661 a. The completion code now attempts to do a better job of preserving the
3662 case of the word the user typed if ignoring case in completions.
3664 b. Readline defaults to not echoing the input and lets the terminal
3665 initialization code enable echoing if there is a controlling terminal.
3667 c. The key binding code now processes only two hex digits after a `\x'
3668 escape sequence, and the documentation was changed to note that the
3669 octal and hex escape sequences result in an eight-bit value rather
3672 3. New Features in Bash
3674 a. The builtin `ulimit' now takes two new non-numeric arguments: `hard',
3675 meaning the current hard limit, and `soft', meaning the current soft
3676 limit, in addition to `unlimited'
3678 b. `ulimit' now prints the option letter associated with a particular
3679 resource when printing more than one limit.
3681 c. `ulimit' prints `hard' or `soft' when a value is not `unlimited' but is
3682 one of RLIM_SAVED_MAX or RLIM_SAVED_CUR, respectively.
3684 4. New Features in Readline
3686 a. New bindable variable `history-preserve-point'. If set, the history
3687 code attempts to place the user at the same location on each history
3688 line retrived with previous-history or next-history.
3690 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3691 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-alpha1,
3692 and the previous version, bash-2.05-release.
3696 a. Better checks in the redirection code for write errors.
3698 b. bashbug now uses $TMPDIR, defaulting to /tmp, and uses mktemp(1) more
3701 c. System-specific configuration changes for: Interix, OpenBSD, FreeBSD,
3704 d. Some more `const' cleanups through the code.
3706 e. Fixed a typo in the /dev/fd redirection code, better checks for valid
3707 numeric fds in /dev/fd.
3709 f. Fixed many parts of the shell to handle integer overflow more gracefully
3710 and to do more stringent checks for valid numbers.
3712 g. Fixed mksignames to include config.h.
3714 h. Fixed an uninitialized variable problem that could cause the shell to core
3715 dump when replacing characters in a string.
3717 i. New mechanism for updating the patch level when official patches are
3718 released (patchlevel.h).
3720 j. configure.in changed to no longer require external files _distribution and
3723 k. Fixed non-interactive shell initialization problem when bash started as
3726 l. Fixed printf builtin conversion error handling to be POSIX.2-conformant.
3728 m. autoconf-2.52 is now used to build configure; autoconf-2.50 or newer is
3729 required. Some of the bash-specific macros were removed, since they are
3732 n. Startup files and files read with source or `.' are no longer required to
3735 o. Fixed core dump in builtin printf when user-supplied precision or field
3738 p. Fixed builtin printf to treat a negative field width as a positive field
3739 width with left-justification.
3741 r. New unwind-protect implementation from Paul Eggert.
3743 s. Fixed an inadvertently-unclosed comment in the bash completion code that
3744 caused programmable completions to not add trailing slashes or spaces to
3747 t. Fixed the process substitution code to cope better when stdin is closed.
3749 v. Fixes, mostly from Paul Eggert, for a few possible buffer overflows in
3752 w. Fixes from Paul Eggert to avoid most of the type casts in the shell code,
3753 and use more appropriate types for a number of variables.
3755 x. Command substition no longer inherits the DEBUG trap.
3757 y. Some fixes to the process substition code on machines without /dev/fd so
3758 that named pipes are not removed inappropriately.
3760 z. The loadable `getconf' builtin is now much more complete, and will become
3761 part of the shell in the future.
3763 aa. The select command no longer terminates on a `return', so it can be used
3764 to return from an enclosing function (as ksh does it).
3766 bb. Fixed the extended pattern matching code to behave better when presented
3767 with incorrectly-formed patterns.
3769 cc. Some changes were made with the intent of making cross-compilation easier.
3771 dd. The network code (/dev/tcp and /dev/udp redirections) uses getaddrinfo(3)
3772 if it's available, which adds support for IPv6.
3774 ee. Subshells of login shells no longer source ~/.bash_logout when they exit.
3776 ff. Fixes so that subshells don't exit inappropriately if the -e option has
3779 gg. Restricted shells no longer allow functions to be exported.
3781 hh. Changes to the pattern matching code so extended pattern matching works
3782 on systems with deficient shared library implementations, like MacOS X.
3784 ii. Better error messages when a script with a leading `#!interp' fails
3785 to execute because of problems with `interp'.
3787 jj. Fixed `compgen' to handle the `-o default' option better.
3789 kk. Fixed the job control code to force an asynchronous process's standard
3790 input to /dev/null only if job control is not active.
3792 ll. Fixed a possible infinite recursion problem when `fc ""=abc' (a null
3793 pattern) is used to re-execute a previous command.
3795 mm. Fixed `declare [-a] var=value' to assign VALUE to element 0 if VAR is an
3796 array variable. Similarly for `declare [-a] var[N]=value'. This is like
3799 nn. Fixed a bug that caused `read -a aname' to work even if ANAME had been
3802 oo. Fixed a possible integer overflow problem when constructing names for
3805 2. New Features in Bash
3807 a. Added support for DESTDIR installation root prefix, so you can do a
3808 `make install DESTDIR=bash-root' and do easier binary packaging.
3810 b. Added support for builtin printf "'" flag character as per latest POSIX
3813 c. Support for POSIX.2 printf(1) length specifiers `j', `t', and `z' (from
3816 d. New autoconf macro, RL_LIB_READLINE_VERSION, for use by other applications
3817 (bash doesn't use very much of what it returns).
3819 e. `set [-+]o nolog' is recognized as required by the latest POSIX drafts,
3822 f. New read-only `shopt' option: login_shell. Set to non-zero value if the
3823 shell is a login shell.
3825 g. New `\A' prompt string escape sequence; expands to time in 24 HH:MM format.
3827 h. New `-A group/-g' option to complete and compgen; does group name
3830 i. New `-t' option to `hash' to list hash values for each filename argument.
3832 j. New [-+]O invocation option to set and unset `shopt' options at startup.
3834 k. configure's `--with-installed-readline' option now takes an optional
3835 `=PATH' suffix to set the root of the tree where readline is installed
3838 l. The ksh-like `ERR' trap has been added. The `ERR' trap will be run
3839 whenever the shell would have exited if the -e option were enabled.
3840 It is not inherited by shell functions.
3842 m. `readonly', `export', and `declare' now print variables which have been
3843 given attributes but not set by assigning a value as just a command and
3844 a variable name (like `export foo') when listing, as the latest POSIX
3847 n. `bashbug' now requires that the subject be changed from the default.
3849 o. configure has a new `--enable-largefile' option, like other GNU utilities.
3851 p. `for' loops now allow empty word lists after `in', like the latest POSIX
3854 3. Changes to Readline
3856 a. More `const' and type casting fixes.
3858 b. Changed rl_message() to use vsnprintf(3) (if available) to fix buffer
3861 c. The completion code no longer appends a `/' or ` ' to a match when
3862 completing a symbolic link that resolves to a directory name, unless
3863 the match does not add anything to the word being completed. This
3864 means that a tab will complete the word up to the full name, but not
3865 add anything, and a subsequent tab will add a slash.
3867 d. Fixed a trivial typo that made the vi-mode `dT' command not work.
3869 e. Fixed the tty code so that ^S and ^Q can be inserted with rl_quoted_insert.
3871 f. Fixed the tty code so that ^V works more than once.
3873 g. Changed the use of __P((...)) for function prototypes to PARAMS((...))
3874 because the use of __P in typedefs conflicted g++ and glibc.
3876 4. New Features in Readline
3878 a. Added extern declaration for rl_get_termcap to readline.h, making it a
3879 public function (it was always there, just not in readline.h).
3881 b. New #defines in readline.h: RL_READLINE_VERSION, currently 0x0402,
3882 RL_VERSION_MAJOR, currently 4, and RL_VERSION_MINOR, currently 2.
3884 c. New readline variable: rl_readline_version, mirrors RL_READLINE_VERSION.
3886 d. New bindable boolean readline variable: match-hidden-files. Controls
3887 completion of files beginning with a `.' (on Unix). Enabled by default.
3889 e. The history expansion code now allows any character to terminate a
3890 `:first-' modifier, like csh.
3892 f. The incremental search code remembers the last search string and uses
3893 it if ^R^R is typed without a search string.
3895 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3896 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-release,
3897 and the previous version, bash-2.05-beta2.
3901 a. Make sure we note that the first line of a multi-line command was not
3902 saved in the history if the tests for HISTCONTROL succeed, but the
3903 HISTIGNORE check fails.
3905 b. Fixed a bug in the pattern matching code that caused `[' to be treated
3906 as a special character inside a `[...]' bracket expression.
3908 c. Fixed a bug in the pattern matching code that caused `]' to terminate
3909 a bracket expression even if it was the first character after the `['
3910 (or a leading `!' or `^').
3912 d. Made a small change to report a more user-friendly error message if
3913 execve(2) fails because of an error with the interpreter in a script
3914 with a leading `#! interpreter'.
3916 e. If the OS does not support an exec(2) magic number of `#!', make sure we
3917 have a non-null interpreter name before attempting to execute it.
3919 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell process to end up in a different
3920 process group than the controlling terminal if a job-control shell was
3921 run with `exec' in the startup files.
3923 g. When started in POSIX mode, either by `bash --posix', `bash -o posix', or
3924 `sh', $SHELLOPTS includes `posix' and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3926 h. Fixed a problem that caused the `\W' prompt string escape sequence to
3927 expand to nothing when $PWD was `//'.
3929 i. The `bashbug' shell script no longer uses $(...) command substitution.
3931 j. When `set' is invoked without options in POSIX mode, it no longer prints
3932 the names and definitions of shell functions.
3934 2. Changes to Readline
3936 a. rl_set_paren_blink_timeout() is now documented.
3938 b. Corrected history.3 man page: `$' is not in the default value of
3939 history_word_delimiters.
3941 c. If a hook function assigned to rl_event_hook sets rl_done to a non-zero
3942 value, rl_read_key() now immediately returns '\n' (which is assumed to
3943 be bound to accept-line).
3945 3. New Features in Bash
3947 a. The `>&word' redirection now works in POSIX mode as it does by default,
3948 since POSIX.2 leaves it unspecified.
3950 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3951 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-beta2,
3952 and the previous version, bash-2.05-beta1.
3956 a. Fixed a bug in the arithmetic evaluation code so that a^=b is supported.
3958 b. Fixed startup so posixly_correct is retained across subshells begun to
3959 execute scripts without a leading `#!'.
3961 c. Fixed a bug that caused $(< file) to not work in a (...) subshell.
3963 d. Added config support for Linux running on the IBM S390.
3965 e. Fixed a bug that caused bash to get its input pointer out of sync when
3966 reading commands through a pipe and running a command with standard
3967 input redirected from a file.
3969 f. Made a change so that command completion now makes about half as many
3970 stat(2) calls when searching the $PATH.
3972 g. Fixed a bug that caused variable assignments preceding `return' to not
3973 be propagated to the shell environment in POSIX mode.
3975 h. Fixed a bug with ${parameter[:]?word} -- tilde expansion was not performed
3978 i. In POSIX mode, `break' and `continue' do not complain and return success
3979 if called when the shell is not executing a loop.
3981 j. Fixed `bash -o posix' to work the same as `bash --posix'.
3983 k. Fixed a bug where variable assignments preceding `eval' or `source/.'
3984 would not show up in the environment exported to subshells run by the
3987 l. In POSIX mode, shells started to execute command substitutions inherit
3988 the value of the `-e' option from their parent shell.
3990 m. In POSIX mode, aliases are expanded even in non-interactive shells.
3992 n. Changed some of the job control messages to display the text required by
3993 POSIX.2 when the shell is in POSIX mode.
3995 o. Fixed a bug in `test' that caused it to occasionally return incorrect
3996 results when non-numeric arguments were supplied to `-t'.
3998 2. Changes to Readline
4000 a. Some changes were made to avoid gcc warnings with -Wall.
4002 b. rl_get_keymap_by_name now finds keymaps case-insensitively, so
4003 `set keymap EMACS' works.
4005 c. The history file writing and truncation functions now return a useful
4008 d. Fixed a bug that could cause applications to dereference a NULL pointer
4009 if a NULL second argument was passed to history_expand().
4011 3. New Features in Bash
4013 a. doc/readline.3 has been moved to the readline distribution.
4015 4. New Features in Readline
4017 a. New function, rl_get_screen_size (int *rows, int *columns), returns
4018 readline's idea of the screen dimensions.
4020 b. The timeout in rl_gather_tyi (readline keyboard input polling function)
4021 is now settable via a function (rl_set_keyboard_input_timeout()).
4023 c. Renamed the max_input_history variable to history_max_entries; the old
4024 variable is maintained for backwards compatibility.
4026 d. The list of characters that separate words for the history tokenizer is
4027 now settable with a variable: history_word_delimiters. The default
4030 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4031 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-beta1,
4032 and the previous version, bash-2.05-alpha1.
4036 a. Changes to allow shared library and object building on the GNU Hurd.
4038 b. Fixes to the way exported functions are placed into the environment and
4041 c. The globbing library once again respects locales when processing ranges
4042 in bracket expressions while doing pattern matching.
4044 d. System-specific configuration changes for: Tru 64, Interix
4046 e. Bashbug now uses /usr/bin/editor as one of the editing alternatives, and
4047 will use mktemp(1) or tempfile(1), if present, for temporary file creation.
4049 f. Bash no longer performs a binary file check on a script argument that's
4050 really a tty (like /dev/fd/0 or /dev/stdin).
4052 g. Fixed a bug in the execution of shell scripts that caused the effects of
4053 $BASH_ENV to be undone in some cases.
4055 h. Fixed several bugs that made `bash [-i] /dev/stdin' not work correctly.
4057 i. Several changes to the job control code to avoid some signal state
4060 j. The Bash malloc no longer blocks signals as often, which should make it
4063 k. Fixed a parsing bug that did not allow backslash to escape a single quote
4064 inside a $'...' construct.
4066 l. Fixed a bug that caused things like ${var:=$'value'} to be parsed
4067 incorrectly. This showed up in newer versions of autoconf.
4069 m. Fixed a bug in the bash-specific readline initialization that caused
4070 key bindings to bash-specific function names appearing in .inputrc to
4073 n. Bash now sets the file descriptor it uses to save the file descriptor
4074 opened on a shell script to close on exec.
4076 o. Fixed a bug in the prompt string decoding that caused it to misbehave
4077 when presented an octal sequence of fewer than three characters.
4079 p. Fixed the `test' builtin to return an error if `[' is supplied a single
4080 argument that is not `]'.
4082 q. Fixed a bug that caused subshells started to run executable shell scripts
4083 without a leading `#!' to incorrectly inherit an argument list preceding
4084 a shell builtin (like such a script called from a script sourced with `.',
4085 where there were variable assignments preceding the `.' command)
4087 r. Fixed a bug that caused changes to variables supplied in an assignment
4088 statement preceding a shell builtin to not be honored (like a script
4091 s. HOSTTYPE, OSTYPE, and MACHTYPE are set only if they do not have values
4092 when the shell is started.
4094 t. Fixed a bug that caused SIGINT to kill shell scripts after the script
4097 u. The `fc' builtin now tries to create its temporary files in the directory
4100 v. Bash no longer calls any Readline functions or uses any Readline variables
4101 not declared in readline.h.
4103 w. Fixed a bug that caused some substitutions involving $@ to not be split
4104 correctly, especially expansions of the form ${paramterOPword}.
4106 x. SSH2_CLIENT is now treated like SSH_CLIENT and not auto-exported if it
4107 appears in the initial environment.
4109 y. Fixed a couple of problems with shell scripts without a leading `#!'
4110 being executed out of shell functions that could cause core dumps if
4111 such a script attempted to execute `return'.
4113 z. Fixed a problem with the `-nt' and `-ot' binary operators for the
4114 `test/[' builtin and the `[[' conditional command that caused wrong
4115 return values if one of the file arguments did not exist.
4117 aa. Fixed a bug that caused non-interactive shells which had previously
4118 executed `shopt -s expand_aliases' to fail to expand aliases in a
4119 command like `(command) &'.
4121 2. Changes to Readline
4123 a. Changes to make most (but not yet all -- there is still crlf()) of the
4124 exported readline functions declared in readline.h have an rl_ prefix.
4126 b. More `const' changes in function arguments, mostly for completion
4129 c. Fixed a bug in rl_forward that could cause the point to be set to before
4130 the beginning of the line in vi mode.
4132 d. Fixed a bug in the callback read-char interface to make it work when a
4133 readline function pushes some input onto the input stream with
4134 rl_execute_next (like the incremental search functions).
4136 e. Fixed a file descriptor leak in the history file manipulation code that
4137 was tripped when attempting to truncate a non-regular file (like
4140 f. Some existing variables are now documented and part of the public
4141 interface (declared in readline.h): rl_explict_arg, rl_numeric_arg,
4142 rl_editing_mode, rl_last_func.
4144 g. Renamed rltty_set_default_bindings to rl_tty_set_default_bindings and
4145 crlf to rl_crlf, so there are no public functions declared in readline.h
4146 without an `rl_' prefix. The old functions still exist for backwards
4149 3. New Features in Bash
4151 a. A new loadable builtin, realpath, which canonicalizes and expands symlinks
4152 in pathname arguments.
4154 b. When `set' is called without options, it prints function defintions in a
4155 way that allows them to be reused as input. This affects `declare' and
4156 `declare -p' as well.
4158 4. New Features in Readline
4160 a. New application-callable function rl_set_prompt(const char *prompt):
4161 expands its prompt string argument and sets rl_prompt to the result.
4163 b. New application-callable function rl_set_screen_size(int rows, int cols):
4164 public method for applications to set readline's idea of the screen
4167 c. The history example program (examples/histexamp.c) is now built as one
4170 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4171 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-alpha1,
4172 and the previous version, bash-2.04-release.
4176 a. A fix was made to allow newlines in compond array assignments.
4178 b. configure now checks for real-time signals with unusable values.
4180 c. Interactive shells no longer exit if a substitution fails because of an
4181 unset variable within a sourced file.
4183 d. Fixed a problem with incorrect matching of extended glob patterns when
4184 doing pattern substitution.
4186 e. `{' is now quoted by the completion code when it appears in a filename.
4188 f. Fixed an error in pattern matching that caused the matcher to not
4189 correctly skip the rest of a bracket expression after a character
4192 g. Fixed a bug in the IFS word splitting code to make a non-whitespace IFS
4193 character preceded by IFS whitespace part of the current delimiter rather
4194 than generating a separate field.
4196 h. The {!prefix@} expansion now generates separate words, analogous to $@,
4199 i. Command substitution now ignores NUL bytes in the command output, and the
4200 parser ignores them on input.
4202 j. A fix was made to the job control code to prevent hanging processes when
4203 the shell thinks background processes are running but the kernel returns
4204 -1/ECHILD from waitpid().
4206 k. `pwd' now prints an error message if the write fails when displaying the
4209 l. When in POSIX mode, the shell prints trap dispostions without a leading
4210 `SIG' in the signal specification.
4212 m. Fixed a parser bug that caused the current command's line count to be
4213 messed up by a compound array assignment.
4215 n. Fixed a bug in the unwind-protect code that caused bad behavior on machines
4216 where ints and pointers are not the same size.
4218 o. System-specific configure changes for: MacOS X.
4220 p. Changes for Cygwin to translate \r\n and \r to \n and to set file
4221 descriptors used for reading input to text mode in various places.
4223 q. Fixed a bug that caused `!' to occasionally not be honored when in
4226 r. Bash no longer assumes that getcwd() will return any useful error message
4227 in the buffer passed as an argument if the call fails.
4229 s. The `source', `.', and `fc' builtins no longer check whether a file is
4230 binary before reading commands from it.
4232 t. Subshells no longer turn off job control when they exit, since that
4233 sometimes resulted in the terminal being reset to the wrong process
4236 u. The history code no longer tries to save the second and subsequent lines
4237 of a multi-line command if the first line was not saved.
4239 v. The history saving code now does a better job of saving blank lines in a
4242 w. Removed a `feature' that made `ulimit' silently translate `unlimited' to
4243 the current hard limit, which obscured some kernel error returns.
4245 x. Fixed the grammar so that `}' is recognized as a reserved word after
4246 another reserved word, rather than requiring a `;' or newline. This
4247 means that constructs like
4249 { { echo a b c ; } }
4253 y. Conditional commands ([[...]]) now perform tilde expansion on their
4256 z. Noted in the documentation that `set -a' will cause functions to be
4257 exported if they are defined after `set -a' is executed.
4259 aa. When an interactive login shell starts, if $PWD and $HOME refer to the
4260 same directory but are not the same string, $PWD is set to $HOME.
4262 bb. Fixed `printf' to handle invalid floating point numbers better.
4264 cc. Temporary files are now created with random filenames, to improve security.
4266 dd. The readline initialization code now binds the custom bash functions and
4267 key bindings after the readline defaults are set up.
4269 ee. Fixed the `source' builtin to no longer overwrite a shell function's
4270 argument list, even if the sourced file changes the positional parameters.
4272 ff. A bug fix was made in the expansion of `$*' in contexts where it should
4273 not be split, like assignment statements.
4275 gg. Fixed a bug in the parameter substring expansion to handle conditional
4276 arithmetic expressions ( exp ? val1 : val2 ) without cutting the expression
4277 off at the wrong `:'.
4279 hh. The `<>' redirection is no longer subject to the current setting of
4280 `noclobber', as POSIX.2 specifies.
4282 ii. Fixed a bug in the conditional command parsing code that caused expressions
4283 in parentheses to occasionally be parsed incorrectly.
4285 jj. Fixed a bug in the ((...)) arithmetic command to allow do...done or
4286 {...} to follow the )) without an intervening list terminator.
4288 kk. `printf' now treats `\E' the same as `\e' when performing backslash escape
4289 expansion for the `%b' format specifier.
4291 ll. When in POSIX mode, the shell no longer searches the current directory for
4292 a file to be sourced with `.' or `source' if `.' is not in $PATH.
4294 mm. Interactive comments are no longer turned off when POSIX mode is disabled.
4296 nn. The UID, EUID, HOSTNAME variables are not set if they are in the shell's
4297 environment when it starts up.
4299 oo. Fixed a bug in the `command' builtin so the effect of a command like
4300 `command exec 4<file' is as if the `command' had been omitted.
4302 pp. ${foo[@]} and ${foo[*]} now work as in ksh93 if `foo' is not an array
4305 qq. ${#foo[X]}, where X is 0, @, or *, now work as in ksh93 if `foo' is not
4308 rr. The shell's idea of an absolute pathname now takes into account a
4309 possible drive specification on Cygwin and other Windows systems.
4311 ss. Fixed a bug which caused incorrect parsing of some multi-character
4312 constructs if they were split across input lines with backslash-newline
4315 tt. Fixed a bug that caused restricted shell mode to be set inappropriately
4316 when trying to execute a shell script without a leading `#!'.
4318 uu. Shell function definitions no longer require that the body be a group
4319 command ( {...} ), as POSIX.2 requires.
4321 vv. The `cd' and `pwd' builtins now process symlinks in pathnames internally
4322 and should require many fewer calls to getcwd().
4324 ww. Fixed a bug that caused a pipeline's process group to be set incorrectly
4325 if one of the pipeline elements contained a command substitution.
4327 xx. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when expanding the value of HISTIGNORE.
4329 yy. The output of `set' is now quoted using $'...' so invisible characters are
4330 displayed as escape sequences.
4332 zz. Fixed the help text for `unset', since PATH and IFS may both be unset.
4334 aaa. The shell no longer puts directory names into the command hash table.
4336 bbb. Fixed a bug in `read' that caused it to occasionally free memory twice if
4337 it was interrupted after reading a large amount of data.
4339 ccc. Assignment statements that attempt to assign values to readonly variables
4340 now cause the command to return an error status.
4342 ddd. Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect output if a $(<file) construct was
4345 eee. GROUPS and FUNCNAME now return an error status when assignment is
4346 attempted, but may be unset (in which case they lose their special
4347 properties). In all respects except unsetting, they are readonly.
4349 fff. The string-to-integer conversion code now ignores trailing whitespace in
4350 the string, even if strtol(3) does not.
4352 ggg. The tcsh magic-space function now does a better job of inserting the
4353 space close to where the point was before the history expansion, rather
4354 than just appending it.
4356 hhh. Fixed a bug which caused a file sourced from an interactive shell to
4357 fill up the jobs table if it ran lots of jobs.
4359 iii. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code to avoid infinite
4360 recursion on zero-length matches.
4362 2. Changes to Readline
4364 a. When setting the terminal attributes on systems using `struct termio',
4365 readline waits for output to drain before changing the attributes.
4367 b. A fix was made to the history word tokenization code to avoid attempts to
4368 dereference a null pointer.
4370 c. Readline now defaults rl_terminal_name to $TERM if the calling application
4371 has left it unset, and tries to initialize with the resultant value.
4373 d. Instead of calling (*rl_getc_function)() directly to get input in certain
4374 places, readline now calls rl_read_key() consistently.
4376 e. Fixed a bug in the completion code that allowed a backslash to quote a
4377 single quote inside a single-quoted string.
4379 f. rl_prompt is no longer assigned directly from the argument to readline(),
4380 but uses memory allocated by readline. This allows constant strings to
4381 be passed to readline without problems arising when the prompt processing
4382 code wants to modify the string.
4384 g. Fixed a bug that caused non-interactive history searches to return the
4385 wrong line when performing multiple searches backward for the same string.
4387 h. Many variables, function arguments, and function return values are now
4388 declared `const' where appropriate, to improve behavior when linking with
4391 i. The control character detection code now works better on systems where
4392 `char' is unsigned by default.
4394 j. The vi-mode numeric argument is now capped at 999999, just like emacs mode.
4396 k. The Function, CPFunction, CPPFunction, and VFunction typedefs have been
4397 replaced with a set of specific prototyped typedefs, though they are
4398 still in the readline header files for backwards compatibility.
4400 m. Nearly all of the (undocumented) internal global variables in the library
4401 now have an _rl_ prefix -- there were a number that did not, like
4402 screenheight, screenwidth, alphabetic, etc.
4404 n. The ding() convenience function has been renamed to rl_ding(), though the
4405 old function is still defined for backwards compatibility.
4407 o. The completion convenience functions filename_completion_function,
4408 username_completion_function, and completion_matches now have an rl_
4409 prefix, though the old names are still defined for backwards compatibility.
4411 p. The functions shared by readline and bash (linkage is satisfied from bash
4412 when compiling with bash, and internally otherwise) now have an sh_ prefix.
4414 q. Changed the shared library creation procedure on Linux and BSD/OS 4.x so
4415 that the `soname' contains only the major version number rather than the
4416 major and minor numbers.
4418 r. Fixed a redisplay bug that occurred when the prompt spanned more than one
4419 physical line and contained invisible characters.
4421 3. New Features in Bash
4423 a. Added a new `--init-file' invocation argument as a synonym for `--rcfile',
4424 per the new GNU coding standards.
4426 b. The /dev/tcp and /dev/udp redirections now accept service names as well as
4429 c. `complete' and `compgen' now take a `-o value' option, which controls some
4430 of the aspects of that compspec. Valid values are:
4432 default - perform bash default completion if programmable
4433 completion produces no matches
4434 dirnames - perform directory name completion if programmable
4435 completion produces no matches
4436 filenames - tell readline that the compspec produces filenames,
4437 so it can do things like append slashes to
4438 directory names and suppress trailing spaces
4440 4. New Features in Readline
4442 a. The blink timeout for paren matching is now settable by applications.
4444 b. _rl_executing_macro has been renamed to rl_executing_macro, which means
4445 it's now part of the public interface.
4447 c. Readline has a new variable, rl_readline_state, which is a bitmap that
4448 encapsulates the current state of the library; intended for use by
4449 callbacks and hook functions.
4451 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4452 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-release,
4453 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta5.
4457 a. Better compile-time and configure-time checks for the necessity of
4460 b. A bug was fixed in the expansion of "${@:-}" when there are positional
4463 c. A typo was fixed in the output of `complete'.
4465 d. The matches generated for a word by the `-W' argument to complete and
4466 compgen are now matched against the word being completed, and only
4467 matches are returned as the result.
4469 e. Some fixes were made for systems which do not restart read(2) when a
4470 signal caught by bash is received.
4472 f. A bug was fixed which caused the umask to be set to 0 when an invalid
4473 symbolic mode mask was parsed.
4475 g. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if a SIGCHLD was received while
4476 performing an assignment statement using command substitution.
4478 h. Changed the word splitting function for programmable completion so cases
4479 in which the cursor is between words are handled a bit better.
4481 2. Changes to Readline
4483 a. rl_funmap_names() is now documented.
4485 3. New Features in Bash
4487 a. The LC_NUMERIC variable is now treated specially, and used to set the
4488 LC_NUMERIC locale category for number formatting, e.g., when `printf'
4489 displays floating-point numbers.
4491 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4492 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta5,
4493 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta4.
4497 a. A couple of changes were made to the Makefiles for easier building on
4500 b. Fixed a bug where the current prompt would be set to $PS2 at startup.
4502 c. The shell script that tests an already-installed version was changed to
4503 remove the directory it created its test programs in at exit.
4505 d. Several changes were made to the code that tokenizes an input line for
4506 the programmable completion code. Shell metacharacters will now appear
4507 as individual words in the word list passed to the completion functions.
4508 Some of the example completion shell functions were changed to understand
4509 redirection operators.
4511 e. A bug was fixed that, under obscure circumstances, could confuse the
4512 parser when a shell function was run by the programmable completion code.
4514 f. A bug was fixed in the ulimit builtin for systems not using getrlimit().
4516 g. The execution code now propagates the correct exit status back to the rest
4517 of the code if the return value of a subshell command was being inverted.
4518 Some new test cases for inverting return values with the `!' reserved
4519 word have been added.
4521 h. Negative exponents in the arithmetic evaluation of v**e now return an
4524 i. A bug that caused bash to check the wrong process in a pipeline for
4525 abnormal termination (and consequently resetting the terminal attributes)
4528 j. Fixed a bug that caused $PS2 to be displayed after PROMPT_COMMAND was
4531 2. Changes to Readline
4533 1. Fixed a bug in a C preprocessor define that caused the keypad control
4534 functions to be compiled out for all platforms except DJGPP.
4536 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4537 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta4,
4538 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta3.
4542 a. A couple of changes were made to the redirection to attempt to avoid
4543 race conditions and malicious file replacement.
4545 2. A change was made to the string evaluation code (used for command
4546 substitution, `eval', and the `.' builtin) to fix an obscure core
4547 dump on alpha machines.
4549 3. A bug that caused $LINENO to be wrong when executing arithmetic for
4552 4. A couple of memory leaks in the programmable completion code were fixed.
4554 5. A bug that could cause a core dump by freeing memory twice during a call
4555 to `eval' if `set -u' had been enabled and an undefined variable was
4556 referenced was fixed.
4558 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4559 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta3,
4560 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta2.
4564 a. Bash should run the appropriate startup files when invoked by ssh2.
4566 b. Fixed a bug in the parsing of conditional commands that could cause a
4569 c. Fixed a bug in parsing job specifications that occasionally caused
4570 core dumps when an out-of-range job was referenced.
4572 d. Fixed the `type' and `command' builtins to do better reporting of
4573 commands that are not found in $PATH or the hash table.
4575 e. Fixed a POSIX.2 compliance problem in the command builtin -- commands
4576 are supposed to be reported as full pathnames.
4578 f. The `echo' builtin now returns failure if a write error occurs.
4580 g. Fixed a bug which caused the locale to not be reset correctly when
4583 h. Changed description of `getopts' in man page and reference manual to make
4584 it clear that option characters may be characters other than letters.
4586 i. If the shell exits while in a function, make sure that any trap on EXIT
4587 doesn't think the function is still executing.
4589 j. Bashbug now tries harder to find a usable editor if $EDITOR is not set,
4590 rather than simply defaulting to `emacs'.
4592 k. Changes to the scripts that guess and canonicalize the system type, from
4593 the latest `automake' distribution via Debian.
4595 l. When using named pipes for process substitution, make sure the file
4596 descriptors opened for reading are set to non-blocking mode.
4598 m. Fixed a bug that caused termination of pipelines that are killed by a
4599 signal to not be reported in some cases.
4601 n. When not in literal-history mode, shell comment lines are not added to
4604 o. When running in POSIX.2 mode, bash no longer performs word splitting on
4605 the expanded value of the word supplied as the filename argument to
4606 redirection operators.
4608 p. The prompt string decoding code now backslash-quotes only characters that
4609 are special within double quotes when expanding the \w and \W escape
4612 q. Fixed a bug in the prompt decoding code that could cause a non-interactive
4613 shell to seg fault if `\u' was used in PS4 and the shell was in xtrace
4616 r. Fixed a bug that caused function definitions to be printed with any
4617 redirections that should be attached to the entire function before the
4620 s. Changed the tilde expansion code for Cygwin systems to avoid creating
4621 pathnames beginning with `//' if $HOME == `/'.
4623 t. Fixed a couple of autoconf tests to avoid creating files with fixed names
4626 u. The `trap' and `kill' builtins now know the names of the POSIX.1b real-
4627 time signals on systems which support them.
4629 2. Changes to Readline
4631 a. Fixed a problem with the single-quote quoting function that could cause
4634 b. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect `stat characters' to be printed if
4635 the files being completed were in the root directory and visible-stats
4638 3. New Features in Bash
4640 a. There is a new `rbash.1' manual page, from the Debian release.
4642 b. The `--enable-usg-echo-default' option to `configure' has been renamed to
4643 `--enable-xpg-echo-default'. The old option is still there for backwards
4646 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4647 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta2,
4648 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta1.
4652 a. Fixed a bug that could cause pipes to be closed inappropriately in
4655 b. Fixed a bug that caused creation of the exported environment to clobber
4656 the current command string if there were any exported shell functions.
4658 c. Some changes were made to reduce bash's memory usage.
4660 d. Fixed a problem with programmable completion and filenames to be
4661 completed containing quote characters.
4663 e. Changed the code the removes named pipes created for the <(...) and >(...)
4664 expansions to defer removal until after any current shell function has
4667 f. Fixed a bug in `select' which caused it to not handle the `continue'
4670 g. Autoconf tests added for cygwin32 and mingw32.
4672 2. New Features in Bash
4674 a. The `--with-bash-malloc' configure option replaces `--with-gnu-malloc'
4675 (which is still there for backwards compatibility).
4677 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4678 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta1,
4679 and the previous version, bash-2.04-alpha1.
4683 a. Fixed a bug in the programmable completion code that occurred when
4684 trying to complete command lines containing a `;' or `@'.
4686 b. The file descriptor from which the shell is reading a script is now
4687 moved to a file descriptor above the user-addressible range.
4689 c. Changes to `printf' so that it can handle integers beginning with 0
4690 or 0x as octal and hex, respectively.
4692 d. Fixes to the programmable completion code so it handles nonsense like
4693 `compgen -C xyz' gracefully.
4695 e. The shell no longer modifies the signal handler for SIGPROF, allowing
4696 profiling again on certain systems.
4698 f. The shell checks for a new window size, if the user has requested it,
4699 after a process exits due to a signal.
4701 g. Fixed a bug with variables with null values in a program's temporary
4702 environment and the bash getenv() replacement.
4704 h. `declare' and the other builtins that take variable assignments as
4705 arguments now honor `set -a' and mark modified variables for export.
4707 i. Some changes were made for --dump-po-strings mode when writing strings
4708 with embedded newlines.
4710 j. The code that caches export strings from the initial environment now
4711 duplicates the string rather than just pointing into the environment.
4713 k. The filename completion quoting code now uses single quotes by default
4714 if the filename being completed contains newlines, since \<newline>
4715 has a special meaning to the parser.
4717 l. Bash now uses typedefs bits32_t and u_bits32_t instead of int32_t and
4718 u_int32_t, respectively to avoid conflicts on certain Unix versions.
4720 m. Configuration changes were made for: Rhapsody, Mac OS, FreeBSD-3.x.
4722 n. Fixed a problem with hostname-to-ip-address translation in the
4723 /dev/(tcp|udp)/hostname/port redirection code.
4725 o. The texinfo manual has been reorganized slightly.
4727 p. Filename generation (globbing) range comparisons in bracket expressions
4728 no longer use strcoll(3) even if it is available, since it has unwanted
4729 effects in certain locales.
4731 q. Fixed a cosmetic problem in the source that caused the shell to not
4732 compile if DPAREN_ARITHMETIC was not defined but ARITH_FOR_COMMAND was.
4734 r. Fixed a bug in the here-document code tripped when the file descriptor
4735 opened to the file containing the text of the here document was the
4736 same as a redirector specified by the user.
4738 s. Fixed a bug where the INVERT_RETURN flag was not being set for `pipeline'
4739 in `time ! pipeline'.
4741 t. Fixed a bug with the `wait' builtin which manifested itself when an
4742 interrupt was received while the shell was waiting for asynchronous
4743 processes in a shell script.
4745 u. Fixed the DEBUG trap code so that it has the correct value of $?.
4747 v. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code that could cause
4748 the shell to attempt to free unallocated memory if the pattern started
4749 with `/' and an expansion error occurs.
4751 w. Fixed a bug in the positional parameter substring code that could
4752 cause the shell to loop freeing freed memory.
4754 x. Fixed a bug in the positional parameter pattern substitution code so
4755 that it correctly handles null replacement strings with a pattern
4756 string prefixed with `%' or `#'.
4758 y. The shell no longer attempts to import functions from the environment if
4761 z. Fixed a bug that caused `return' in a command substitution executed in
4762 a shell function to return from the function in a subshell and continue
4765 aa. `hash -p /pathname/with/slashes name' is no longer allowed when the shell
4768 bb. The wait* job control functions now behave better if called when there
4769 are no unwaited-for children.
4771 cc. Command substitution no longer unconditionally disables job control in
4772 the subshell started to run the command.
4774 dd. A bug was fixed that occasionally caused traps to mess up the parser
4777 ee. `bashbug' now honors user headers in the mail message it sends.
4779 ff. A bug was fixed that caused the `:p' history modifier to not print the
4780 history expansion if the `histverify' option was set.
4782 2. Changes to Readline
4784 a. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code for lines with more than 256 line
4787 b. A bug was fixed which caused invisible character markers to not be
4788 stripped from the prompt string if the terminal was in no-echo mode.
4790 c. Readline no longer tries to get the variables it needs for redisplay
4791 from the termcap entry if the calling application has specified its
4792 own redisplay function. Readline treats the terminal as `dumb' in
4795 d. Fixes to the SIGWINCH code so that a multiple-line prompt with escape
4796 sequences is redrawn correctly.
4798 3. New Features in Bash
4800 a. `bashbug' now accepts `--help' and `--version' options.
4802 b. There is a new `xpg_echo' option to `shopt' that controls the behavior
4803 of echo with respect to backslash-escaped characters at runtime.
4805 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4806 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-alpha1,
4807 and the previous version, bash-2.04-devel.
4811 a. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when performing substring
4814 b. Shared object configuration changes for: Solaris, OSF/1
4816 c. The POSIX_GLOB_LIBRARY code that uses the POSIX.2 globbing facilities
4817 for pathname expansion now understands GLOBIGNORE.
4819 d. The code that implements `eval' was changed to save the value of the
4820 current prompt, so an eval in a shell function called by the programmable
4821 completion code will not change the prompt to $PS2.
4823 e. Restored the undocumented NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS #define to
4824 config-top.h. If this is defined, all login shells will read the
4825 startup files, not just interactive and non-interactive started with
4826 the `--login' option.
4828 f. Fixed a bug that caused the expansion code to occasionally dump core if
4829 IFS contained characters > 128.
4831 g. Fixed a problem with the grammar so that a newline is not required
4832 after the `))' in the new-style arithmetic for statement; a semicolon
4833 may be used as expected.
4835 h. Variable indirection may now reference the shell's special variables.
4837 i. The $'...' and $"..." constructs are now added to the history correctly
4838 if they contain newlines and command-oriented history is enabled.
4840 j. It is now an error to try to assign a value to a function-local copy
4841 of a readonly shell variable (declared with the `local' builtin).
4843 2. Changes to Readline
4845 a. The history file code now uses O_BINARY mode when reading and writing
4846 the history file on cygwin32.
4848 3. New Features in Bash
4850 a. A new programmable completion facility, with two new builtin commands:
4851 complete and compgen.
4853 b. configure has a new option, `--enable-progcomp', to compile in the
4854 programmable completion features (enabled by default).
4856 c. `shopt' has a new option, `progcomp', to enable and disable programmable
4857 completion at runtime.
4859 d. Unsetting HOSTFILE now clears the list of hostnames used for completion.
4861 4. New Features in Readline
4863 a. A new variable, rl_gnu_readline_p, always 1. The intent is that an
4864 application can verify whether or not it is linked with the `real'
4865 readline library or some substitute.
4867 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4868 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-devel,
4869 and the previous version, bash-2.03-release.
4873 a. System-specific configuration and source changes for: Interix, Rhapsody
4875 b. Fixed a bug in execute_cmd.c that resulted in a compile-time error if
4876 JOB_CONTROL was not defined.
4878 c. An obscure race condition in the trap code was fixed.
4880 d. The string resulting from $'...' is now requoted to avoid any further
4883 e. The $'...' quoting syntax now allows backslash to escape a single quote,
4884 for ksh-93 compatibility.
4886 f. The $"..." quoting syntax now escapes backslashes and double quotes in
4887 the translated string when displaying them with the --dump-po-strings
4890 g. `echo -e' no longer converts \' to '.
4892 h. Fixes were made to the extended globbing code to handle embedded (...)
4895 i. Some improvements were made to the code that unsets `nodelay' mode on
4896 the file descriptor from which bash is reading input.
4898 j. Some changes were made to the replacement termcap library for better
4899 operation on MS-DOS.
4901 k. Some changes were made to the tilde expansion code to handle backslash
4902 as a pathname separator on MS-DOS.
4904 l. The source has been reorganized a little bit -- there is now an `include'
4905 subdirectory, and lib/posixheaders has been removed.
4907 m. Improvements were made to the `read' builtin so that it makes many
4908 fewer read(2) system calls.
4910 n. The expansion of $- will include `c' and `s' when those options are
4911 supplied at shell invocation.
4913 o. Several improvments were made to the completion code: variable completion
4914 now works better when there are unterminated expansions, command
4915 completion understands quotes better, and completion now works in certain
4916 unclosed $(... constructs.
4918 p. The arithmetic expansion code was fixed to not need the value of a
4919 variable being assigned a value (fixes the "ss=09; let ss=10" bug).
4921 q. Some changes were made to make exported environment creation faster.
4923 r. The html documentation will be installed into $(htmldir) if that variable
4924 has a value when `make install' is run.
4926 s. Fixed a bug that would cause the bashrc file to be sourced inappropriately
4927 when bash is started by sshd.
4929 t. The SSH_CLIENT environment variable is no longer auto-exported.
4931 u. A bug that caused redirections with (...) subshells to be performed in
4932 the wrong order was fixed.
4934 v. A bug that occasionally caused inappropriate expansion of assignment
4935 statements in compound array assignments was fixed.
4937 w. The code that parses the words in a compound array assignment was
4938 simplified considerably and should work better now.
4940 x. Fixes to the non-job-control code in nojobs.c to make it POSIX.2-compliant
4941 when a user attempts to retrieve the status of a terminated background
4944 y. Fixes to the `printf' builtin so that it doesn't try to expand all
4945 backslash escape sequences in the format string before parsing it for
4946 % format specifiers.
4948 2. Changes to Readline
4950 a. The history library tries to truncate the history file only if it is a
4953 b. A bug that caused _rl_dispatch to address negative array indices on
4954 systems with signed chars was fixed.
4956 c. rl-yank-nth-arg now leaves the history position the same as when it was
4959 d. Changes to the completion code to handle MS-DOS drive-letter:pathname
4962 e. Completion is now case-insensitive by default on MS-DOS.
4964 f. Fixes to the history file manipulation code for MS-DOS.
4966 g. Readline attempts to bind the arrow keys to appropriate defaults on MS-DOS.
4968 h. Some fixes were made to the redisplay code for better operation on MS-DOS.
4970 i. The quoted-insert code will now insert tty special chars like ^C.
4972 j. A bug was fixed that caused the display code to reference memory before
4973 the start of the prompt string.
4975 k. More support for __EMX__ (OS/2).
4977 l. A bug was fixed in readline's signal handling that could cause infinite
4978 recursion in signal handlers.
4980 m. A bug was fixed that caused the point to be less than zero when rl_forward
4981 was given a very large numeric argument.
4983 n. The vi-mode code now gets characters via the application-settable value
4984 of rl_getc_function rather than calling rl_getc directly.
4986 3. New Features in Bash
4988 a. The history builtin has a `-d offset' option to delete the history entry
4989 at position `offset'.
4991 b. The prompt expansion code has two new escape sequences: \j, the number of
4992 active jobs; and \l, the basename of the shell's tty device name.
4994 c. The `bind' builtin has a new `-x' option to bind key sequences to shell
4997 d. There is a new shell option, no_empty_command_completion, which, when
4998 enabled, disables command completion when TAB is typed on an empty line.
5000 e. The `help' builtin has a `-s' option to just print a builtin's usage
5003 f. There are several new arithmetic operators: id++, id-- (variable
5004 post-increment/decrement), ++id, --id (variabl pre-increment/decrement),
5005 expr1 , expr2 (comma operator).
5007 g. There is a new ksh-93 style arithmetic for command:
5008 for ((expr1 ; expr2; expr3 )); do list; done
5010 h. The `read' builtin has a number of new options:
5011 -t timeout only wait timeout seconds for input
5012 -n nchars only read nchars from input instead of a full line
5013 -d delim read until delim rather than newline
5014 -s don't echo input chars as they are read
5016 i. The redirection code now handles several filenames specially:
5017 /dev/fd/N, /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr, whether or
5018 not they are present in the file system.
5020 j. The redirection code now recognizes pathnames of the form
5021 /dev/tcp/host/port and /dev/udp/host/port, and tries to open a socket
5022 of the appropriate type to the specified port on the specified host.
5024 k. The ksh-93 ${!prefix*} expansion, which expands to the names of all
5025 shell variables whose names start with prefix, has been implemented.
5027 l. There is a new dynamic variable, FUNCNAME, which expands to the name of
5028 a currently-executing function. Assignments to FUNCNAME have no effect.
5030 m. The GROUPS variable is no longer readonly; assignments to it are silently
5031 discarded. This means it can be unset.
5033 4. New Features in Readline
5035 a. Parentheses matching is now always compiled into readline, and enabled
5036 or disabled when the value of the `blink-matching-paren' variable is
5039 b. MS-DOS systems now use ~/_inputrc as the last-ditch inputrc filename.
5041 c. MS-DOS systems now use ~/_history as the default history file.
5043 d. history-search-{forward,backward} now leave the point at the end of the
5044 line when the string to search for is empty, like
5045 {reverse,forward}-search-history.
5047 e. history-search-{forward,backward} now leave the last history line found
5048 in the readline buffer if the second or subsequent search fails.
5050 f. New function for use by applications: rl_on_new_line_with_prompt, used
5051 when an application displays the prompt itself before calling readline().
5053 g. New variable for use by applications: rl_already_prompted. An application
5054 that displays the prompt itself before calling readline() must set this to
5057 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5058 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-release,
5059 and the previous version, bash-2.03-beta2.
5063 a. A file descriptor leak in the `fc' builtin was fixed.
5065 b. A bug was fixed in the `read' builtin that caused occasional spurious
5066 failures when using `read -e'.
5068 c. The version code needed to use the value of the cpp variable
5069 CONF_MACHTYPE rather than MACHTYPE.
5071 d. A new test was added to exercise the command printing and copying code.
5073 e. A bug was fixed that caused `time' to be recognized as a reserved word
5074 if it was the first pattern in a `case' statement pattern list.
5076 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5077 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-beta2,
5078 and the previous version, bash-2.03-beta1.
5082 a. Slight additions to support/shobj-conf, mostly for the benefit of AIX 4.2.
5084 b. config.{guess,sub} support added for the NEC SX4.
5086 c. Changed some of the cross-compiling sections of the configure macros in
5087 aclocal.m4 so that configure won't abort.
5089 d. Slight changes to how the HTML versions of the bash and readline manuals
5092 e. Fixed conditional command printing to avoid interpreting printf `%'-escapes
5095 f. Don't include the bash malloc on all variants of the alpha processor.
5097 g. Changes to configure to make --enable-profiling work on Solaris 2.x.
5099 h. Fixed a bug that manifested itself when shell functions were called
5100 between calls to `getopts'.
5102 i. Fixed pattern substitution so that a bare `#'as a pattern causes the
5103 replacement string to be prefixed to the search string, and a bare
5104 `%' causes the replacement string to be appended to the search string.
5106 j. Fixed a bug in the command execution code that caused child processes
5107 to occasionally have the wrong value for $!.
5109 2. Changes to Readline
5111 a. Added code to the history library to catch history substitutions using
5112 `&' without a previous history substitution or search having been
5115 3. New Features in Bash
5117 4. New Features in Readline
5119 a. New bindable variable: `isearch-terminators'.
5121 b. New bindable function: `forward-backward-delete-char' (unbound by default).
5123 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5124 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-beta1,
5125 and the previous version, bash-2.03-alpha.
5129 a. A change was made to the help text for `{...}' to make it clear that a
5130 semicolon is required before the closing brace.
5132 b. A fix was made to the `test' builtin so that syntax errors cause test
5133 to return an exit status > 1.
5135 c. Globbing is no longer performed on assignment statements that appear as
5136 arguments to `assignment builtins' such as `export'.
5138 d. System-specific configuration changes were made for: Rhapsody,
5139 AIX 4.2/gcc, BSD/OS 4.0.
5141 e. New loadable builtins: ln, unlink.
5143 f. Some fixes were made to the globbing code to handle extended glob patterns
5144 which immediately follow a `*'.
5146 g. A fix was made to the command printing code to ensure that redirections
5147 following compound commands have a space separating them from the rest
5150 h. The pathname canonicalization code was changed to produce fewer leading
5151 `//' sequences, since those are interpreted as network file system
5152 pathnames on some systems.
5154 i. A fix was made so that loops containing `eval' commands in commands passed
5155 to `bash -c' would not exit prematurely.
5157 j. Some changes were made to the job reaping code when the shell is not
5158 interactive, so the shell will retain exit statuses longer for examination
5161 k. A fix was made so that `jobs | command' works again.
5163 l. The erroneous compound array assignment var=((...)) is now a syntax error.
5165 m. A change was made to the dynamic loading code in `enable' to support
5168 n. A fix was made to the globbing code so that extended globbing patterns
5169 will correctly match `.' in a bracket expression.
5171 2. Changes to Readline
5173 a. A fix was made to the completion code in which a typo caused the wrong
5174 value to be passed to the function that computed the longest common
5175 prefix of the list of matches.
5177 b. The completion code now checks the value of rl_filename_completion_desired,
5178 which is set by application-supplied completion functions to indicate
5179 that filename completion is being performed, to decide whether or not to
5180 call an application-supplied `ignore completions' function.
5182 3. New Features in Bash
5184 a. A change was made to the startup file code so that any shell begun with
5185 the `--login' option, even non-interactive shells, will source the login
5186 shell startup files.
5188 4. New Features in Readline
5190 a. A new variable, rl_erase_empty_line, which, if set by an application using
5191 readline, will cause readline to erase, prompt and all, lines on which the
5192 only thing typed was a newline.
5194 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5195 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-alpha,
5196 and the previous version, bash-2.02.1-release.
5200 a. System-specific configuration changes were made for: Irix 6.x, Unixware 7.
5202 b. The texi2dvi and texi2html scripts were updated to the latest versions
5205 c. The configure tests that determine which native type is 32 bits were
5206 changed to not require a compiled program.
5208 d. Fixed a bug in shell_execve that could cause memory to be freed twice
5209 after a failed exec.
5211 e. The `printf' test uses `diff -a' if it's available to prevent confusion
5212 due to the non-ascii output.
5214 f. Shared object configuration is now performed by a shell script,
5215 support/shobj-conf, which generates values to be substituted into
5216 makefiles by configure.
5218 g. Some changes were made to `ulimit' to avoid the use of RLIM_INVALID as a
5221 h. Changes were made to `ulimit' to work around HPUX 9.x's peculiar
5222 handling of RLIMIT_FILESIZE.
5224 i. Some new loadable builtins were added: id, printenv, sync, whoami, push,
5225 mkdir. `pushd', `popd', and `dirs' can now be built as regular or
5226 loadable builtins from the same source file.
5228 j. Changes were made to `printf' to handle NUL bytes in the expanded format
5231 k. The various `make clean' Makefile targets now descend into lib/sh.
5233 l. The `type' builtin was changed to use the internal `getopt' so that things
5234 like `type -ap' work as expected.
5236 m. There is a new configuration option, --with-installed-readline, to link
5237 bash with a locally-installed version of readline. Only readline version
5238 4.0 and later releases can support this. Shared and static libraries
5239 are supported. The installed include files are used.
5241 n. There is a new autoconf macro used to find which basic type is 64 bits.
5243 o. Dynamic linking and loadable builtins should now work on SCO 3.2v5*,
5244 AIX 4.2 with gcc, Unixware 7, and many other systems using gcc, where
5245 the `-shared' options works correctly.
5247 p. A bug was fixed in the bash filename completion code that caused memory to
5248 be freed twice if a directory name containing an unset variable was
5249 completed and the -u option was set.
5251 q. The prompt expansion code now quotes the `$' in the `\$' expansion so it
5252 is not processed by subsequent parameter expansion.
5254 r. Fixed a parsing bug that caused a single or double quote after a `$$' to
5255 trigger ANSI C expansion or locale translation.
5257 s. Fixed a bug in the globbing code that caused quoted filenames containing
5258 no globbing characters to sometimes be incorrectly expanded.
5260 t. Changes to the default prompt strings if prompt string decoding is not
5261 compiled into the shell.
5263 u. Added `do', `then', `else', `{', and `(' to the list of keywords that may
5264 precede the `time' reserved word.
5266 v. The shell may now be cross-built for BeOS as well as cygwin32.
5268 w. The conditional command execution code now treats `=' the same as `=='
5269 for deciding when to perform pattern matching.
5271 x. The `-e' option no longer causes the shell to exit if a command exits
5272 with a non-zero status while running the startup files.
5274 y. The `printf' builtin no longer dumps core if a modifier is supplied in
5275 the format string without a conversion character (e.g. `%h').
5277 z. Array assignments of the form a=(...) no longer show up in the history
5280 aa. The parser was fixed to obey the POSIX.2 rules for finding the closing
5281 `}' in a ${...} expression.
5283 bb. The history file is now opened with mode 0600 rather than 0666, so bash
5284 no longer relies on the user's umask being set appropriately.
5286 cc. Setting LANG no longer causes LC_ALL to be assigned a value; bash now
5287 relies on proper behavior from the C library.
5289 dd. Minor changes were made to allow quoted variable expansions using
5290 ${...} to be completed correctly if there is no closing `"'.
5292 ee. Changes were made to builtins/Makefile.in so that configuring the shell
5293 with `--enable-profiling' works right and builtins/mkbuiltins is
5296 2. Changes to Readline
5298 a. The version number is now 4.0.
5300 b. There is no longer any #ifdef SHELL code in the source files.
5302 c. Some changes were made to the key binding code to fix memory leaks and
5303 better support Win32 systems.
5305 d. Fixed a silly typo in the paren matching code -- it's microseconds, not
5308 e. The readline library should be compilable by C++ compilers.
5310 f. The readline.h public header file now includes function prototypes for
5311 all readline functions, and some changes were made to fix errors in the
5312 source files uncovered by the use of prototypes.
5314 g. The maximum numeric argument is now clamped at 1000000.
5316 h. Fixes to rl_yank_last_arg to make it behave better.
5318 i. Fixed a bug in the display code that caused core dumps if the prompt
5319 string length exceeded 1024 characters.
5321 j. The menu completion code was fixed to properly insert a single completion
5322 if there is only one match.
5324 k. A bug was fixed that caused the display code to improperly display tabs
5327 3. New Features in Bash
5329 a. New `shopt' option, `restricted_shell', indicating whether or not the
5330 shell was started in restricted mode, for use in startup files.
5332 b. Filename generation is now performed on the words between ( and ) in
5333 array assignments (which it probably should have done all along).
5335 c. OLDPWD is now auto-exported, as POSIX.2 seems to require.
5337 d. ENV and BASH_ENV are read-only variables in a restricted shell.
5339 4. New Features in Readline
5341 a. Many changes to the signal handling:
5342 o Readline now catches SIGQUIT and cleans up the tty before returning;
5343 o A new variable, rl_catch_signals, is available to application writers
5344 to indicate to readline whether or not it should install its own
5345 signal handlers for SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT, SIGALRM, SIGTSTP,
5346 SIGTTIN, and SIGTTOU;
5347 o A new variable, rl_catch_sigwinch, is available to application
5348 writers to indicate to readline whether or not it should install its
5349 own signal handler for SIGWINCH, which will chain to the calling
5350 applications's SIGWINCH handler, if one is installed;
5351 o There is a new function, rl_free_line_state, for application signal
5352 handlers to call to free up the state associated with the current
5353 line after receiving a signal;
5354 o There is a new function, rl_cleanup_after_signal, to clean up the
5355 display and terminal state after receiving a signal;
5356 o There is a new function, rl_reset_after_signal, to reinitialize the
5357 terminal and display state after an application signal handler
5358 returns and readline continues
5360 b. There is a new function, rl_resize_terminal, to reset readline's idea of
5361 the screen size after a SIGWINCH.
5363 c. New public functions: rl_save_prompt and rl_restore_prompt. These were
5364 previously private functions with a `_' prefix.
5366 d. New function hook: rl_pre_input_hook, called just before readline starts
5367 reading input, after initialization.
5369 e. New function hook: rl_display_matches_hook, called when readline would
5370 display the list of completion matches. The new function
5371 rl_display_match_list is what readline uses internally, and is available
5372 for use by application functions called via this hook.
5374 f. New bindable function, delete-char-or-list, like tcsh.
5376 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5377 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02.1-release,
5378 and the previous version, bash-2.02-release.
5382 a. A bug that caused the bash readline support to not compile unless aliases
5383 and csh-style history were configured into the shell was fixed.
5385 b. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when here documents contained
5386 more than 1000 characters.
5388 c. Fixed a bug that caused a CDPATH entry of "" to not be treated the same
5389 as the current directory when in POSIX mode.
5391 d. Fixed an alignment problem with the memory returned by the bash malloc,
5392 so returned memory is now 64-bit aligned.
5394 e. Fixed a bug that caused command substitutions executed within pipelines
5395 to put the terminal in the wrong process group.
5397 f. Fixes to support/config.sub for: alphas, SCO Open Server and Open Desktop,
5398 Unixware 2, and Unixware 7.
5400 g. Fixes to the pattern matching code to make it work correctly for eight-bit
5403 h. Fixed a problem that occasionally caused the shell to display the wrong
5404 value for the new working directory when changing to a directory found
5405 in $CDPATH when in physical mode.
5407 i. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when using conditional commands in
5410 j. Fixed a bug that caused the printf builtin to loop forever if the format
5411 string did not consume any of the arguments.
5413 k. Fixed a bug in the parameter expansion code that caused "$@" to be
5414 incorrectly split if $IFS did not contain a space character.
5416 l. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when completing hostnames if
5417 the number of matching hostnames was an exact multiple of 16.
5419 m. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to fork too early when a command
5420 such as `%2 &' was given.
5422 2. Changes to Readline
5424 a. Fixed a problem with redisplay that showed up when the prompt string was
5425 longer than the screen width and the prompt contained invisible characters.
5427 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5428 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-release,
5429 and the previous version, bash-2.02-beta2.
5433 a. A bug was fixed that caused the terminal process group to be set
5434 incorrectly when performing command substitution of builtins in a
5437 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5438 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-beta2,
5439 and the previous version, bash-2.02-beta1.
5443 a. Attempting to `wait' for stopped jobs now generates a warning message.
5445 b. Pipelines which exit due to SIGPIPE in non-interactive shells are now
5446 not reported if the shell is compiled -DDONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE.
5448 c. Some changes were made to builtins/psize.sh and support/bashbug.sh to
5449 attempt to avoid some /tmp file races and surreptitious file
5452 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell not to compile if configured with
5453 dparen arithmetic but without aliases.
5455 e. Fixed a bug that caused the input stream to be switched when assigning
5456 empty arrays with `bash -c'.
5458 f. A bug was fixed in the readline expansion glue code that caused bash to
5459 dump core when expanding lines with an unclosed single quote.
5461 g. A fix was made to the `cd' builtin so that using a non-empty directory
5462 from $CDPATH results in an absolute pathname of the new current working
5463 directory to be displayed after the current directory is changed.
5465 h. Fixed a bug in the variable assignment code that caused the shell to
5466 dump core when referencing an unset variable with `set -u' enabled in
5467 an assignment statement preceding a command.
5469 i. Fixed a bug in the exit trap code that caused reserved words to not be
5470 recognized under certain circumstances.
5472 j. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code so that quote
5473 removal is performed.
5475 k. The shell should now configure correctly on Apple Rhapsody systems.
5477 l. The `kill' builtin now prints a usage message if it is not passed any
5480 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5481 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-beta1,
5482 and the previous version, bash-2.02-alpha1.
5486 a. A few compilation bugs were fixed in the new extended globbing code.
5488 b. Executing arithmetic commands now sets the command name to `((' so
5489 error messages look right.
5491 c. Fixed some build problems with various configuration options.
5493 d. The `printf' builtin now aborts immediately if an illegal format
5494 character is encountered.
5496 e. The code that creates here-documents now behaves better if the file it's
5497 trying to create already exists for some reason.
5499 f. Fixed a problem with the extended globbing code that made patterns like
5500 `x+*' expand incorrectly.
5502 g. The prompt string expansion code no longer quotes tildes with backslashes.
5504 h. The bash getcwd() implementation in lib/sh/getcwd.c now behaves better in
5505 the presence of lstat(2) failures.
5507 i. Fixed a bug with strsub() that caused core dumps when executing `fc -s'.
5509 j. The mail checking code now ensures that it has a valid default mailpath.
5511 k. A bug was fixed that caused local variables to be unset inappropriately
5512 when sourcing a script from within another sourced script.
5514 l. A bug was fixed in the history saving code so that functions are saved
5515 in the history list correctly if `cmdhist' is enabled, but `lithist'
5518 m. A bug was fixed that caused printf overflows when displaying error
5521 n. It should be easier to build the loadble builtins in examples/loadables,
5522 though some manual editing of the generated Makefile is still required.
5524 o. The user's primary group is now always ${GROUPS[0]}.
5526 p. Some updates were made to support/config.guess from the GNU master copy.
5528 q. Some changes were made to the autoconf support for Solaris 2.6 large
5531 r. The `command' builtins now does the right thing when confstr(3) cannot
5532 find a value for _CS_PATH.
5534 s. Extended globbing expressions like `*.!(c)' are not history expanded if
5535 `extglob' is enabled.
5537 t. Using the `-P' option to `cd' will force the value that is assigned to
5538 PWD to not contain any symbolic links.
5540 2. Changes to Readline
5542 a. The code that prints completion listings now behaves better if one or
5543 more of the filenames contains non-printable characters.
5545 b. The time delay when showing matching parentheses is now 0.5 seconds.
5547 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5548 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-alpha1,
5549 and the previous version, bash-2.01.1-release.
5553 a. OS-specific configuration changes for: BSD/OS 3.x, Minix 2.x,
5554 Solaris 2.6, SINIX SVR4.
5556 b. Changes were made to the generated `info' files so that `install-info'
5559 c. PWD is now auto-exported.
5561 d. A fix was made to the pipeline code to make sure that the shell forks
5562 to execute simple commands consisting solely of assignment statements.
5564 e. Changes to the test suite for systems with 14-character filenames.
5566 f. The default sizes of some internal hash tables have been made smaller
5567 to reduce the shell's memory footprint.
5569 g. The `((...))' arithmetic command is now executed directly instead of
5570 being translated into `let "..."'.
5572 h. Fixes were made to the expansion code so that "$*", "$@", "${array[@]}",
5573 and "${array[@]}" expand correctly when IFS does not contain a space
5574 character, is unset, or is set to NULL.
5576 i. The indirect expansion code (${!var}) was changed so that the only
5577 valid values of `var' are variable names, positional parameters, `#',
5580 j. An arithmetic expression error in a $((...)) expansion now causes a
5581 non-interactive shell running in posix mode to exit.
5583 k. Compound array assignment now splits the words within the parentheses
5584 on shell metacharacters like the parser would before expansing them
5585 and performing the assignment. This is for compatibility with ksh-93.
5587 l. The internal shell backslash-quoting code (used in the output of `set'
5588 and completion) now quotes tildes if they appear at the start of the
5589 string or after a `=' or `:'.
5591 m. A couple of bugs with `shopt -o' were fixed.
5593 n. `bash +o' now displays the same output as `set +o' before starting an
5596 o. A bug that caused command substitution and the `eval' builtin to
5597 occasionally free memory twice when an error was encountered was fixed.
5599 p. The filename globbing code no longer requires read permission for a
5600 directory when the filename to be matched does not contain any globbing
5601 characters, as POSIX.2 specifies.
5603 q. A bug was fixed so that the job containing the last asynchronous
5604 process is not removed from the job table until a `wait' is executed
5605 for that process or another asynchronous process is started. This
5606 satisfies a POSIX.2 requirement.
5608 r. A `select' bug was fixed so that a non-numeric user response is treated
5609 the same as a numeric response that is out of range.
5611 s. The shell no longer parses the value of SHELLOPTS from the environment
5612 if it is restricted, running setuid, or running in `privileged mode'.
5614 t. Fixes were made to enable large file support on systems such as
5615 Solaris 2.6, where the size of a file may be larger than can be held
5618 u. The filename hashing code was fixed to not add `./' to the beginning of
5619 filenames which already begin with `./'.
5621 v. The configure script was changed so that the GNU termcap library is not
5622 compiled in if `prefer-curses' has been specified.
5624 w. HISTCONTROL and HISTIGNORE are no longer applied to the second and
5625 subsequent lines of a multi-line command.
5627 x. A fix was made to `disown' so that it does a better job of catching
5630 y. Non-interactive shells no longer report the status of processes terminated
5631 due to SIGINT, even if the standard output is a terminal.
5633 z. A bug that caused the output of `jobs' to have extra carriage returns
5636 aa. A bug that caused PIPESTATUS to not be set when builtins or shell
5637 functions were executed in the foreground was fixed.
5639 bb. Bash now attempts to detect when it is being run by sshd, and treats
5640 that case identically to being run by rshd.
5642 cc. A bug that caused `set -a' to export SHELLOPTS when one of the shell
5643 options was changed was fixed.
5645 dd. The `kill' builtin now disallows empty or missing process id arguments
5646 instead of treating them as identical to `0', which means the current
5649 ee. `var=value declare -x var' now behaves identically to
5650 `var=value export var'. Similarly for `var=value declare -r var' and
5651 `var=value readonly var'.
5653 ff. A few memory leaks were fixed.
5655 gg. `alias' and `unalias' now print error messages when passed an argument
5656 that is not an alias for printing or deletion, even when the shell is
5657 not interactive, as POSIX.2 specifies.
5659 hh. `alias' and `alias -p' now return a status of 0 when no aliases are
5660 defined, as POSIX.2 specifes.
5662 ii. `cd -' now prints the pathname of the new working directory if the shell
5665 jj. A fix was made so that the code that binds $PWD now copes with getcwd()
5668 kk. `unset' now checks whether or not a function name it's trying to unset
5669 is a valid shell identifier only when the shell is running in posix mode.
5671 ll. A change was made to the code that generates filenames for here documents
5672 to make them less prone to name collisions.
5674 mm. The parser was changed so that `time' is recognized as a reserved word
5675 only at the beginning of a pipeline.
5677 nn. The pathname canonicalization code was changed so that `//' is converted
5678 into `/', but all other pathnames beginning with `//' are left alone, as
5681 oo. The `logout' builtin will no longer exit a non-interactive non-login
5684 2. Changes to Readline
5686 a. Fixed a problem in the readline test program rltest.c that caused a core
5689 b. The code that handles parser directives in inputrc files now displays
5690 more error messages.
5692 c. The history expansion code was fixed so that the appearance of the
5693 history comment character at the beginning of a word inhibits history
5694 expansion for that word and the rest of the input line.
5696 3. New Features in Bash
5698 a. A new version of malloc, based on the older GNU malloc, that has many
5699 changes, is more page-based, is more conservative with memory usage,
5700 and does not `orphan' large blocks when they are freed.
5702 b. A new version of gmalloc, based on the old GLIBC malloc, with many
5703 changes and range checking included by default.
5705 c. A new implementation of fnmatch(3) that includes full POSIX.2 Basic
5706 Regular Expression matching, including character classes, collating
5707 symbols, equivalence classes, and support for case-insensitive pattern
5710 d. ksh-88 egrep-style extended pattern matching ([@+*?!](patlist)) has been
5711 implemented, controlled by a new `shopt' option, `extglob'.
5713 e. There is a new ksh-like `[[' compound command, which implements
5714 extended `test' functionality.
5716 f. There is a new `printf' builtin, implemented according to the POSIX.2
5719 g. There is a new feature for command substitution: $(< filename) now expands
5720 to the contents of `filename', with any trailing newlines removed
5721 (equivalent to $(cat filename)).
5723 h. There are new tilde prefixes which expand to directories from the
5726 i. There is a new `**' arithmetic operator to do exponentiation.
5728 j. There are new configuration options to control how bash is linked:
5729 `--enable-profiling', to allow bash to be profiled with gprof, and
5730 `--enable-static-link', to allow bash to be linked statically.
5732 k. There is a new configuration option, `--enable-cond-command', which
5733 controls whether or not the `[[' command is included. It is on by
5736 l. There is a new configuration option, `--enable-extended-glob', which
5737 controls whether or not the ksh extended globbing feature is included.
5738 It is enabled by default.
5740 m. There is a new configuration #define in config.h.top that, when enabled,
5741 will cause all login shells to source /etc/profile and one of the user-
5742 specific login shell startup files, whether or not the shell is
5745 n. There is a new invocation option, `--dump-po-strings', to dump
5746 a shell script's translatable strings ($"...") in GNU `po' format.
5748 o. There is a new `shopt' option, `nocaseglob', to enable case-insensitive
5749 pattern matching when globbing filenames and using the `case' construct.
5751 p. There is a new `shopt' option, `huponexit', which, when enabled, causes
5752 the shell to send SIGHUP to all jobs when an interactive login shell
5755 q. `bind' has a new `-u' option, which takes a readline function name as an
5756 argument and unbinds all key sequences bound to that function in a
5759 r. `disown' now has `-a' and `-r' options, to limit operation to all jobs
5760 and running jobs, respectively.
5762 s. The `shopt' `-p' option now causes output to be displayed in a reusable
5765 t. `test' has a new `-N' option, which returns true if the filename argument
5766 has been modified since it was last accessed.
5768 u. `umask' now has a `-p' option to print output in a reusable format.
5770 v. A new escape sequence, `\xNNN', has been added to the `echo -e' and $'...'
5771 translation code. It expands to the character whose ascii code is NNN
5774 w. The prompt string expansion code has a new `\r' escape sequence.
5776 x. The shell may now be cross-compiled for the CYGWIN32 environment on
5779 4. New Features in Readline
5781 a. There is now an option for `iterative' yank-last-arg handline, so a user
5782 can keep entering `M-.', yanking the last argument of successive history
5785 b. New variable, `print-completions-horizontally', which causes completion
5786 matches to be displayed across the screen (like `ls -x') rather than up
5787 and down the screen (like `ls').
5789 c. New variable, `completion-ignore-case', which causes filename completion
5790 and matching to be performed case-insensitively.
5792 d. There is a new bindable command, `magic-space', which causes history
5793 expansion to be performed on the current readline buffer and a space to
5794 be inserted into the result.
5796 e. There is a new bindable command, `menu-complete', which enables tcsh-like
5797 menu completion (successive executions of menu-complete insert a single
5798 completion match, cycling through the list of possible completions).
5800 f. There is a new bindable command, `paste-from-clipboard', for use on Win32
5801 systems, to insert the text from the Win32 clipboard into the editing
5804 g. The key sequence translation code now understands printf-style backslash
5805 escape sequences, including \NNN octal escapes. These escape sequences
5806 may be used in key sequence definitions or macro values.
5808 h. An `$include' inputrc file parser directive has been added.
5810 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5811 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01.1-release,
5812 and the previous version, bash-2.01-release.
5816 a. The select command was fixed to check the validity of the user's
5817 input more strenuously.
5819 b. A bug was fixed that prevented `time' from timing commands correctly
5820 when supplied as an argument to `bash -c'.
5822 c. A fix was made to the mail checking code to keep from adding the same
5823 mail file to the list of files to check multiple times when parsing
5826 d. Fixed an off-by-one error in the tilde expansion library.
5828 e. When using the compound array assignment syntax, the old value of
5829 the array is cleared before assigning the new value.
5831 f. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when a trap handler was reset
5832 to the default in the trap command associated with that signal.
5834 g. Fixed a bug in the locale code that occurred when assigning a value
5837 h. A change was made to the parser so that words of the form xxx=(...)
5838 are not considered compound assignment statements unless there are
5839 characters before the `='.
5841 i. A fix was made to the command tracing code to correctly quote each
5844 j. Some changes were made to the bash-specific autoconf tests to make them
5847 k. Completion of words with globbing characters now correctly quotes the
5850 l. The directory /var/spool/mail is now preferred to /usr/spool/mail when
5851 configure is deciding on the default mail directory.
5853 m. The brace completion code was fixed to not quote the `{' and `}'.
5855 n. Some fixes were made to make $RANDOM more random in subshells.
5857 o. System-specific changes were made to configure for: SVR4.2
5859 p. Changes were made so that completion of words containing globbing chars
5860 substitutes the result only if a single filename was matched.
5862 q. The window size is now recomputed after a job is stopped with SIGTSTP if
5863 the user has set `checkwinsize' with `shopt'.
5865 r. When doing substring expansion, out-of-range substring specifiers now
5866 cause nothing to be substituted rather than an expansion error.
5868 s. A fix was made so that you can no longer trap `SIGEXIT' or `SIGDEBUG' --
5869 only `EXIT' and `DEBUG' are accepted.
5871 t. The display of trapped signals now uses the signal number if signals
5872 for which bash does not know the name are trapped.
5874 u. A fix was made so that `bash -r' does not turn on restricted mode until
5875 after the startup files are executed.
5877 v. A bug was fixed that occasionally caused a core dump when a variable
5878 found in the temporary environment of export/declare/readonly had a
5881 w. A bug that occasionally caused unallocated memory to be passed to free()
5882 when doing arithmetic substitution was fixed.
5884 x. A bug that caused a buffer overrun when expanding a prompt string
5885 containing `\w' and ${#PWD} exceeded PATH_MAX was fixed.
5887 y. A problem with the completion code that occasionally caused it to
5888 refer to a character before the beginning of the readline line buffer
5891 z. A bug was fixed so that the `read' builtin restarts reads when
5892 interrupted by signals other than SIGINT.
5894 aa. Fixed a bug that caused a command to be freed twice when there was
5895 an evaluation error in the `eval' command.
5897 2. Changes to Readline
5899 a. Added a missing `extern' to a declaration in readline.h that kept
5900 readline from compiling cleanly on some systems.
5902 b. The history file is now opened with mode 0600 when it is written for
5905 c. Changes were made to the SIGWINCH handling code so that prompt redisplay
5908 d. ^G now interrupts incremental searches correctly.
5910 e. A bug that caused a core dump when the set of characters to be quoted
5911 when completing words was empty was fixed.
5913 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5914 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-release,
5915 and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta2.
5919 a. The `distclean' target should remove the `printenv' executable if it
5922 b. The test suite was changed slightly to ensure that the error messages
5923 are printed in English.
5925 c. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when a filename containing a
5926 `/' was passed to `hash' was fixed.
5928 d. Pathname canonicalization now leaves a leading `//' intact, as POSIX.1
5931 e. A memory leak when completing commands was fixed.
5933 f. A memory leak that occurred when checking the hash table for commands
5934 with relative paths was fixed.
5936 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5937 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta2,
5938 and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta1.
5942 a. The `ulimit' builtin translates RLIM_INFINITY to the hard limit only if
5943 the current (soft) limit is less than or equal to the hard limit.
5945 b. Fixed a bug that caused the bash emulation of strcasecmp to produce
5948 c. A bug that caused memory to be freed twice when a trap handler resets
5949 the trap more than once was fixed.
5951 d. A bug that caused machines where sizeof (pointer) > sizeof (int) to
5952 fail (and possibly dump core) when trying to unwind-protect a null
5955 e. The startup files should not be run with job control enabled. This fix
5956 allows SIGINT to once again interrupt startup file execution.
5958 f. Bash should not change the SIGPROF handler if it is set to something
5961 g. The completion code that provides bash-specific completions for readline
5962 now quotes characters that the readline code would treat as word break
5963 characters if they appear in a file name.
5965 h. The completion code now correctly quotes filenames containing a `!',
5966 even if the user attempted to use double quotes when attempting
5969 i. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `disown' was called without
5970 arguments and there was no current job was fixed.
5972 j. A construct like $((foo);bar) is now processed as a command substitution
5973 rather than as a bad arithmetic substitution.
5975 k. A couple of bugs that caused `fc' to not obey the `cmdhist' and `lithist'
5976 shell options when editing and re-executing a series of commands were
5979 l. A fix was made to the grammar -- the list of commands between `do' and
5980 `done' in the body of a `for' command should be treated the same as a
5983 2. Changes to Readline
5985 a. A couple of bugs that caused the history search functions to attempt to
5986 free a NULL pointer were fixed.
5988 b. If the C library provides setlocale(3), readline does not need to look
5989 at various environment variables to decide whether or not to go into
5990 eight-bit mode automatically -- just check whether the current locale
5991 is not `C' or `POSIX'.
5993 c. If the filename completion function finds that a directory was not closed
5994 by a previous (interrupted) completion, it closes the directory with
5997 3. New Features in Bash
5999 a. New bindable readline commands: history-and-alias-expand-line and
6000 alias-expand-line. The code was always in there, there was just no
6003 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6004 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta1,
6005 and the previous version, bash-2.01-alpha1.
6009 a. Fixed a problem that could cause file descriptors used for process
6010 substitution to conflict with those used explicitly in redirections.
6012 b. Made it easier to regenerate configure if the user changes configure.in.
6014 c. ${GROUPS[0]} should always be the primary group, even on systems without
6017 d. Spelling correction is no longer enabled by default.
6019 e. Fixes to quoting problems in `bashbug'.
6021 f. OS-specific configuration changes were made for: Irix 6.
6023 g. OS-specific code changes were made for: QNX.
6025 h. A more meaningful message is now printed when the file in /tmp for a
6026 here document cannot be created.
6028 i. Many changes to the shell's variable initialization code to speed
6029 non-interactive startup.
6031 j. Changes to the non-job-control code so that it does not try to open
6034 k. The output of `set' and `export' is once again sorted, as POSIX wants.
6036 l. Fixed a problem caused by a recursive call reparsing the value of
6039 m. The tilde code no longer calls getenv() when it's compiled as part of
6040 the shell, which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot
6041 redefine getenv(), like the NeXT OS.
6043 n. Fixed a problem that caused `bash -o' or `bash +o' to not list all
6046 o. Fixed `ulimit' to convert RLIM_INFINITY to the appropriate hard limit
6047 only if the hard limit is greater than the current (soft) limit.
6049 p. Fixed a problem that arose when building bash in a different directory
6050 than the source and y.tab.[ch] were remade with something other than
6051 bison. This came up most often on NetBSD.
6053 q. Fixed a problem with completion -- it thought that `pwd`/[TAB] indicated
6054 an unfinished command completion (`/), which generated errors.
6056 r. The bash special tilde expansions (~-, ~+) are now attempted before
6057 calling the standard tilde expansion code, which should eliminate the
6058 problems people have been seeing with this on Solaris 2.5.1.
6060 s. Added support for <stdarg.h> to places where it was missing.
6062 t. Changed the code that reads the output of a command substitution to not
6063 go through stdio. This reduces the memory requirements and is faster.
6065 u. A number of changes to speed up export environment creation were made.
6067 v. A number of memory leaks were fixed as the result of running the test
6068 scripts through Purify.
6070 w. Fixed a bug that caused subshells forked to interpret executable
6071 scripts without a leading `#!' to not reinitialize the values of
6074 2. Changes to Readline
6076 a. History library has less `#ifdef SHELL' code -- abstracted stuff out
6077 into application-specific function hooks.
6079 b. Readline no longer calls getenv() if it's compiled as part of the shell,
6080 which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot redefine getenv(),
6083 c. Fixed translation of ESC when `untranslating' macro values.
6085 d. The region kill operation now fixes the mark if it ends up beyond the
6086 boundaries of the line after the region is deleted.
6088 3. New Features in Bash
6090 a. New argument for `configure': `--with-curses'. This can be used to
6091 override the selection of the termcap library on systems where it is
6094 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6095 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-alpha1,
6096 and the previous version, bash-2.0-release.
6100 a. System-specific configuration changes for: FreeBSD, SunOS4, Irix,
6101 MachTen, QNX 4.2, Harris Night Hawk, SunOS5.
6103 b. System-specific code changes were made for: Linux, 4.4 BSD, QNX 4.2,
6106 c. A bug that caused the exec builtin to fail because the full pathname of
6107 the command could not be found was fixed.
6109 d. The code that performs output redirections is now more resistant to
6110 race conditions and possible security exploits.
6112 e. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing pattern
6113 substitutions on variable values was fixed.
6115 f. More hosts are now recognized by the auto-configuration mechanism
6116 (OpenBSD, QNX, others).
6118 g. Assignments to read-only variables that attempt to convert them to
6119 arrays are now errors.
6121 h. A bug that caused shell scripts using array assignments in POSIX mode
6122 to exit after the assignment was performed was fixed.
6124 i. The substring expansion code is now more careful about running off the
6125 ends of the expanded variable value.
6127 j. A bug that caused completion to fail if a backquoted command substitution
6128 appeared anywhere on the line was fixed.
6130 k. The `source' builtin no longer turns off history if it has been enabled
6131 in a non-interactive shell.
6133 l. A bug that caused the shell to crash when `disown' was given a pid
6134 instead of a job number was fixed.
6136 m. The `cd' spelling correction code will not try to change to `.' if no
6137 directory entries match a single-character argument.
6139 n. A bad variable name supplied to `declare', `export', or `readonly' no
6140 longer causes a non-interactive shell in POSIX mode to exit.
6142 o. Some fixes were made to the test suite to handle peculiarities of
6143 various Unix versions.
6145 p. The bash completion code now quotes characters that readline would
6146 treat as word breaks for completion but are not shell metacharacters.
6148 q. Bad options supplied at invocation now cause a usage message to be
6151 r. Fixes were made to the code that handles DEBUG traps so that the trap
6152 string is not freed inappropriately.
6154 s. Some changes were made to the bash debugger in examples/bashdb -- it
6155 should be closer to working now.
6157 t. A problem that caused the default filename used for mail checking to be
6160 u. A fix was made to the `echo' builtin so that NUL characters printed with
6161 `echo -e' do not cause the output to be truncated.
6163 v. A fix was made to the job control code so that the shell behaves better
6164 when monitor mode is enabled in a non-interactive shell.
6166 w. Bash no longer catches all of the terminating signals in a non-
6167 interactive shell until a trap is set on EXIT, which should result in
6170 x. A fix was made to the command timing code so that `time' can be used in
6173 y. A fix was made to the parser so that `((cmd); cmd2)' is now parsed as
6174 a nested subshell rather than strictly as an (erroneous) arithmetic
6177 z. A fix was made to the globbing code so that it correctly matches quoted
6178 filenames beginning with a `.'.
6180 aa. A bug in `fc' that caused some multi-line commands to not be stored as
6181 one command in the history when they were re-executed after editing
6182 (with `fc -e') was fixed.
6184 bb. The `ulimit' builtin now attempts to catch some classes of integer
6187 cc. The command-oriented-history code no longer attempts to add `;'
6188 inappropriately when a newline appears while reading a $(...) command
6191 dd. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `help --' was executed
6194 ee. A bug that caused the shell to crash when an unset variable appeared
6195 in the body of a here document after `set -u' had been executed was
6198 ff. Implicit input redirections from /dev/null for asynchronous commands
6199 are now handled better.
6201 gg. A bug that caused the shell to fail to compile when configured with
6202 `--disable-readline' was fixed.
6204 hh. The globbing code should now be interruptible.
6206 ii. Bash now notices when the `kill' builtin is used to send SIGCONT to a
6207 stopped job and adjusts the data structures accordingly, as if `bg' had
6208 been executed instead.
6210 jj. A bug that caused the shell to crash when mixing calls to `getopts'
6211 and `shift' on the same set of positional parameters was fixed.
6213 kk. The command printing code now preserves the `-p' flag to `time'.
6215 ll. The command printing code now handles here documents better when there
6216 are other redirections associated with the command.
6218 mm. The special glibc environment variable (NNN_GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_)
6219 is no longer placed into the environment of executed commands -- users
6220 of glibc had too many problems with it.
6222 nn. Reorganized the code that generates signames.h. The signal_names list
6223 is now more complete but may be slightly different (SIGABRT is favored
6224 over SIGIOT, for example). The preferred signal names are those
6225 listed in the POSIX.2 standard.
6227 oo. `bashbug' now uses a filename shorter than 14 characters for its
6228 temporary file, and asks for confirmation before sending the bug
6231 pp. A bug that caused TAB completion in vi editing mode to not be turned
6232 off when `set -o posix' was executed or back on when `set +o posix'
6233 was executed was fixed.
6235 qq. A bug in the brace expansion code that caused brace expansions appearing
6236 in new-style $(...) command substitutions to be inappropriately expanded
6239 rr. A bug in the readline hook shell-expand-line that could cause memory to
6240 be inappropriately freed was fixed.
6242 ss. A bug that caused some arithmetic expressions containing `&&' and `||'
6243 to be parsed with the wrong precedence has been fixed.
6245 tt. References to unbound variables after `set -u' has been executed now
6246 cause the shell to exit immediately, as they should.
6248 uu. A bug that caused the shell to exit inappropriately when `set -e' had
6249 been executed and a command's return status was being inverted with the
6250 `!' reserved word was fixed.
6252 vv. A bug that could occasionally cause the shell to crash with a
6253 divide-by-zero error when timing a command was fixed.
6255 ww. A bug that caused parameter pattern substitution to leave stray
6256 backslashes in the replacement string when the expression is in
6257 double quotes was fixed.
6259 xx. The `break' and `continue' builtins now break out of all loops when an
6260 invalid count argument is supplied.
6262 yy. Fixed a bug that caused PATH to be set to the empty string if
6263 `command -p' is executed with PATH unset.
6265 zz. Fixed `kill -l signum' to print the signal name without the `SIG' prefix,
6268 aaa. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash while setting $SHELLOPTS
6269 if there were no shell options set.
6271 bbb. Fixed `export -p' and `readonly -p' so that when the shell is in POSIX
6272 mode, their output is as POSIX.2 specifies.
6274 ccc. Fixed a bug in `readonly' so that `readonly -a avar=(...)' actually
6275 creates an array variable.
6277 ddd. Fixed a bug that prevented `time' from correctly timing background
6280 2. Changes to Readline
6282 a. A bug that caused an extra newline to be printed when the cursor was on
6283 an otherwise empty line was fixed.
6285 b. An instance of memory being used after it was freed was corrected.
6287 c. The redisplay code now works when the prompt is longer than the screen
6290 d. `dump-macros' is now a bindable name, as it should have been all along.
6292 e. Non-printable characters are now expanded when displaying macros and
6295 f. The `dump-variables' and `dump-macros' commands now output a leading
6296 newline if they're called as the result of a key sequence, rather
6297 than directly by an application.
6299 3. New Features in Bash
6301 a. There is a new builtin array variable: GROUPS, the set of groups to which
6302 the user belongs. This is used by the test suite.
6304 4. New Features in Readline
6306 a. If a key sequence bound to `universal-argument' is read while reading a
6307 numeric argument started with `universal-argument', it terminates the
6308 argument but is otherwise ignored. This provides a way to insert multiple
6309 instances of a digit string, and is how GNU emacs does it.
6311 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6312 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-release,
6313 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta3.
6317 a. Fix to the `getopts' builtin so that it does the right thing when a
6318 required option argument is not present.
6320 b. The completion code now updates the common prefix of matched names
6321 after FIGNORE processing is done, since any names that were removed
6322 may have changed the common prefix.
6324 c. Fixed a bug that made messages in MAILPATH entries not work correctly.
6326 d. Fixed a serious documentation error in the description of the new
6327 ${parameter:offset[:length]} expansion.
6329 e. Fixes to make parameter substring expansion ({$param:offset[:length]})
6330 work when within double quotes.
6332 f. Fixes to make ^A (CTLESC) survive an unquoted expansion of positional
6335 g. Corrected a misspelling of `unlimited' in the output of `ulimit'.
6337 h. Fixed a bug that caused executable scripts without a leading `#!' to
6338 occasionally pick up the wrong set of positional parameters.
6340 i. Linux systems now have a working `ulimit -v', using RLIMIT_AS.
6342 j. Updated config.guess so that many more machine types are recognized.
6344 k. Fixed a bug with backslash-quoted slashes in the ${param/pat[/sub]}
6347 l. If the shell is named `-su', and `-c command' is supplied, read and
6348 execute the login shell startup files even though the shell is not
6349 interactive. This is to support the `-' option to `su'.
6351 m. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when the DEBUG trap was ignored
6352 with `trap "" DEBUG' and a shell function was subsequently executed.
6354 n. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps in the read builtin when IFS was
6355 set to the null string and the input had leading whitespace.
6357 2. Changes to Readline
6359 a. Fixed a bug that caused a numeric argument of 1024 to be ignored when
6362 b. Fixed the display code so that the numeric argument is displayed as it's
6365 c. Fixed the numeric argument reading code so that `M-- command' is
6366 equivalent to `M--1 command', as the prompt implies.
6368 3. New Features in Bash
6370 a. `ulimit' now sets both hard and soft limits and reports the soft limit
6371 by default (when neither -H nor -S is specified). This is compatible
6372 with versions of sh and ksh that implement `ulimit'.
6374 b. Integer constants have been extended to base 64.
6376 4. New Features in Readline
6378 a. The `home' and `end' keys are now bound to beginning-of-line and
6379 end-of-line, respectively, if the corresponding termcap capabilities
6382 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6383 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta3,
6384 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta2.
6388 a. System-specific changes for: AIX 4.2, SCO 3.2v[45], HP-UX.
6390 b. When in POSIX mode, variable assignments preceding a special builtin
6391 persist in the shell environment after the builtin completes.
6393 c. Changed all calls to getwd() to getcwd(). Improved check for systems
6394 where the libc getcwd() calls popen(), since that breaks on some
6395 systems when job control is being used.
6397 d. Fixed a bug that caused seg faults when executing scripts with the
6398 execute bit set but without a leading `#!'.
6400 e. The environment passed to executed commands is never sorted.
6402 f. A bug was fixed in the code that expands ${name[@]} to the number of
6403 elements in an array variable.
6405 g. A bug was fixed in the array compound assignment code ( A=( ... ) ).
6407 h. Window size changes now correctly propagate down to readline if
6408 the shopt `checkwinsize' option is enabled.
6410 i. A fix was made in the code that expands to the length of a variable
6413 j. A fix was made to the command builtin so that it did not turn on the
6414 `no fork' flag inappropriately.
6416 k. A fix was made to make `set -n' work more reliably.
6418 l. A fix was made to the job control initialization code so that the
6419 terminal process group is set to the shell's process group if the
6420 shell changes its own process group.
6422 2. Changes to Readline
6424 a. System-specific changes for: SCO 3.2v[45].
6426 b. The behavior of the vi-mode `.' when redoing an `i' command was changed
6427 to insert the text previously inserted by the `i' command rather than
6428 simply entering insert mode.
6430 3. New features in Bash
6432 a. There is a new version of the autoload function package, in
6433 examples/functions/autoload.v2, that uses arrays and provides more
6436 b. Support for LC_COLLATE and locale-specific sorting of the results of
6437 pathname expansion if strcoll() is available.
6439 4. New Features in Readline
6441 a. Support for locale-specific sorting of completion possibilities if
6442 strcoll() is available.
6444 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6445 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta2,
6446 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta1.
6450 a. `pushd -' is once again equivalent to `pushd $OLDPWD'.
6452 b. OS-specific changes for: SCO 3.2v[45].
6454 c. A change was made to the fix for the recently-reported security hole
6455 when reading characters with octal value 255 to make it work better on
6456 systems with restartable system calls when not using readline.
6458 d. Some changes were made to the test suite so that it works if you
6459 configure bash with --enable-usg-echo-default.
6461 e. A fix was made to the parsing of conditional arithmetic expressions.
6463 f. Illegal arithmetic bases now cause an arithmetic evaluation error rather
6464 than being silently reset.
6466 g. Multiple arithmetic bases now cause an arithmetic evaluation error
6467 instead of being ignored.
6469 h. A fix was made to the evaluation of ${param?word} to conform to POSIX.2.
6471 i. A bug that sometimes caused array indices to be evaluated twice (which
6472 would cause errors when they contained assignment statements) was fixed.
6474 j. `ulimit' was rewritten to avoid problems with getrlimit(2) returning
6475 unsigned values and to simplify the code.
6477 k. A bug in the command-oriented-history code that caused it to sometimes
6478 put semicolons after right parens inappropriately was fixed.
6480 l. The values inserted into the prompt by the \w and \W escape sequences
6481 are now quoted to prevent further expansion.
6483 m. An interactive shell invoked as `sh' now reads and executes commands
6484 from the file named by $ENV when it starts up. If it's a login shell,
6485 it does this after reading /etc/profile and ~/.profile.
6487 n. The file named by $ENV is never read by non-interactive shells.
6489 2. Changes to Readline
6491 a. A few changes were made to hide some macros and functions that should not
6494 b. An off-by-one error that caused seg faults in the history expansion code
6497 3. New Features in Bash
6499 a. The ksh-style ((...)) arithmetic command was implemented. It is exactly
6500 identical to let "...". This is controlled by a new option to configure,
6501 `--enable-dparen-arithmetic', which is on by default.
6503 b. There is a new #define available in config.h.top: SYS_BASH_LOGOUT. If
6504 defined to a filename, bash reads and executes commands from that file
6505 when a login shell exits. It's commented out by default.
6507 c. `ulimit' has a `-l' option that reports the maximum amount of data that
6508 may be locked into memory on 4.4BSD-based systems.
6510 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6511 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta1,
6512 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha4.
6516 a. A bug that sometimes caused traps to be ignored on signals the
6517 shell treats specially was fixed.
6519 b. The internationalization code was changed to track the values of
6520 LC_* variables and call setlocale() as appropriate. The TEXTDOMAIN
6521 and TEXTDOMAINDIR variables are also tracked; changes cause calls
6522 to textdomain() and bindtextdomain(), if available.
6524 c. A bug was fixed that sometimes caused double-quoted strings to be
6527 d. Changes were made so that the siglist code compiles correctly on
6530 e. Added `:' to the set of characters that cause word breaks for the
6531 completion code so that pathnames in assignments to $PATH can be
6534 f. The `select' command was fixed to print $PS3 to stderr.
6536 g. Fixed an error in the manual page section describing the effect that
6537 setting and unsetting GLOBIGNORE has on the setting of the `dotglob'
6540 h. The time conversion code now uses CLK_TCK rather than CLOCKS_PER_SEC
6541 on systems without gettimeofday() and resources.
6543 i. The getopt static variables are now initialized each time a subshell
6544 is started, so subshells using `getopts' work right.
6546 j. A sign-extension bug that caused a possible security hole was fixed.
6548 k. The parser now reads characters between backquotes within a double-
6549 quoted string as a single word, so double quotes in the backquoted
6550 string don't terminate the enclosing double-quoted string.
6552 l. A bug that caused `^O' to work incorrectly when typed as the first
6553 thing to an interactive shell was fixed.
6555 m. A rarely-exercised off-by-one error in the code that quotes variable
6558 n. Some memory and file descriptor leaks encountered when running a
6559 shell script that is executable but does not have a leading `#!'
6562 2. Changes to Readline
6564 a. A bug that sometimes caused incorrect results when trying to read
6565 typeahead on systems without FIONREAD was fixed.
6567 3. New Features in Bash
6569 a. The command timing code now uses the value of the TIMEFORMAT variable
6570 to format and display timing statistics.
6572 b. The `time' reserved word now accepts a `-p' option to force the
6573 POSIX.2 output format.
6575 c. There are a couple of new and updated scripts to convert csh startup
6576 files to bash format.
6578 d. There is a new builtin array variable: BASH_VERSINFO. The various
6579 members hold the parts of the version information in BASH_VERSION,
6580 plus the value of MACHTYPE.
6582 4. New Features in Readline
6584 a. Setting LANG to `en_US.ISO8859-1' now causes readline to enter
6587 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6588 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha4,
6589 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha3.
6593 a. There is better detection of rsh connections on Solaris 2.
6595 b. Assignments to read-only variables preceding a command name are now
6596 variable assignment errors. Variable assignment errors cause
6597 non-interactive shells running in posix mode to exit.
6599 c. The word tokenizer was rewritten to handle nested quotes and pairs
6600 ('', "", ``, ${...}, $(...), $[...], $'...', $"...", <(...), >(...))
6601 correctly. Some of the parameter expansion code was updated as a
6604 d. A fix was made to `test' when given three arguments so that a binary
6605 operator is checked for first, before checking that the first argument
6608 e. 2''>/dev/null is no longer equivalent to 2>/dev/null.
6610 f. Parser error messages were regularized, and in most cases the name of
6611 the shell script being read by a non-interactive shell is not printed
6614 g. A fix was made to the completion code so that it no longer removes the
6615 text the user typed in some cases.
6617 h. The special glibc `getopt' environment variable is no longer put into
6618 the environment on machines with small values of ARG_MAX.
6620 i. The expansion of ${...} now follows the POSIX.2 rules for finding the
6623 j. The shell no longer displays spurious status messages for background
6624 jobs in shell scripts that complete successfully when the script is
6625 run from a terminal.
6627 k. `shopt -o' now correctly updates $SHELLOPTS.
6629 l. A bug that caused the $PATH searching code to return a non-executable
6630 file even when an executable file with the same name appeared later in
6633 m. The shell now does tilde expansions on unquoted `:~' in assignment
6634 statements when not in posix mode.
6636 n. Variable assignment errors when a command consists only of assignments
6637 now cause non-interactive shells to exit when in posix mode.
6639 o. If the variable in a `for' or `select' command is read-only, or not a
6640 legal shell identifier, a variable assignment error occurs.
6642 p. `test' now handles `-a' and `-o' as binary operators when three arguments
6643 are supplied, and correctly parses `( word )' as equivalent to `word'.
6645 q. `test' was fixed so that file names of the form /dev/fd/NN mean the same
6646 thing on all systems, even Linux.
6648 r. Fixed a bug in the globbing code that caused patterns with multiple
6649 consecutive `*'s to not be matched correctly.
6651 s. Fixed a bug that caused $PS2 to not be printed when an interactive shell
6652 not using readline is reading a here document.
6654 t. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to be performed inappropriately
6655 when a single-quoted string spanned more than one line.
6657 u. `getopts' now checks that the variable name passed by the user as the
6658 second argument is a legal shell identifier and that the variable is
6661 v. Fixed `getopts' to obey POSIX.2 rules for setting $OPTIND when it
6662 encounters an error.
6664 w. Fixed `set' to display variable values in a form that can be re-read.
6666 x. Fixed a bug in the code that keeps track of whether or not local variables
6667 have been declared at the current level of function nesting.
6669 y. Non-interactive shells in posix mode now exit if the name in a function
6670 declaration is not a legal identifier.
6672 z. The job control code now ignores stopped children when the shell is not
6675 aa. The `cd' builtin no longer attempts spelling correction on the directory
6676 name if the shell is not interactive, regardless of the setting of the
6679 bb. Some OS-specific changes were made for SCO 3.2v[45] and AIX 4.2.
6681 cc. `time' now prints its output to stderr, as POSIX.2 specifies.
6683 2. Fixes to Readline
6685 a. After printing possible completions, all lines of a multi-line prompt
6688 b. Some changes were made to the terminal handling code in rltty.c to
6689 work around AIX 4.2 bugs.
6691 3. New Features in Bash
6693 a. There is a new loadable builtin: sprintf, with calling syntax
6694 sprintf var format [args]
6695 This provides an easy way to simulate ksh left- and right-justified
6698 b. The expansions of \h and \H in prompt strings were swapped. \h now
6699 expands to the hostname up to the first `.', as in bash-1.14.
6701 4. New Features in Readline
6703 a. The bash-1.14 behavior when ^M is typed while doing an incremental
6704 search was restored. ^J may now be used to terminate the search without
6707 b. There is a new bindable variable: disable-completion. This inhibits
6708 word completion and causes the completion character to be inserted as
6709 if it had been bound to self-insert.
6711 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6712 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha3,
6713 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha2.
6715 There is now a file `COMPAT' included in the distribution that lists the
6716 user-visible incompatibilities between 1.14 and 2.0.
6720 a. Some work was done so that word splitting of the rhs of assignment
6721 statements conforms more closely to historical practice.
6723 b. A couple of errant memory frees were fixed.
6725 c. A fix was made to the test builtin so it recognizes `<' and `>' as
6728 d. The GNU malloc in lib/malloc/malloc.c now scrambles memory as it's
6729 allocated and freed. This is to catch callers that refer to freed
6730 memory or assume something about newly-allocated memory.
6732 e. Fixed a problem with conversion to 12-hour time in the prompt
6735 f. Fixed a problem with configure's argument parsing order. Now you can
6736 correctly turn on specific options after using --enable-minimal-config.
6738 g. The configure script now automatically disables the use of GNU malloc
6739 on systems where it's appropriate (better than having people read the
6740 NOTES file and do it manually).
6742 h. There are new prompt expansions (\v and \V) to insert version information
6743 into the prompt strings.
6745 i. The default prompt string now includes the version number.
6747 j. Most of the builtins that take no options were changed to use the
6748 internal getopt so they can produce proper error messages for -?
6749 and incorrect options.
6751 k. Some system-specific changes were made for SVR4.2 and Solaris 2.5.
6753 l. Bash now uses PATH_MAX instead of MAXPATHLEN and NAME_MAX instead of
6756 m. A couple of problems caused by uninitialized variables were fixed.
6758 n. There are a number of new loadable builtin examples: logname, basename,
6759 dirname, tty, pathchk, tee, head, and rmdir. All of these conform to
6762 o. Bash now notices changes in TZ and calls tzset() if present, so
6763 changing TZ will alter the time printed by prompt expansions.
6765 p. The source was reorganized a bit so I don't have to wait so long for
6766 some files to compile, and to facilitate the creation of a `shell
6767 library' at some future point.
6769 q. Bash no longer turns off job control if called as `sh', since the
6770 POSIX.2 spec includes job control as a standard feature.
6772 r. `bash -o posix' now works as intended.
6774 s. Fixed a problem with the completion code: when completing a filename
6775 that contained globbing characters, if show-all-if-ambiguous was set,
6776 the completion code would remove the user's text.
6778 t. Fixed ulimit so that (hopefully) the full range of limits is available
6781 u. A new `shopt' option (`hostcomplete') enables and disables hostname
6784 v. The shell no longer attempts to save the history on an abort(),
6785 which is usually called by programming_error().
6787 w. The `-s' option to `fc' was changed to echo the command to be executed
6788 to stderr instead of stdout.
6790 x. If the editor invoked by `fc -e' exits with a non-zero status, no
6791 commands are executed.
6793 y. Fixed a bug that made the shopt `histverify' option work incorrectly.
6795 z. There is a new variable `MACHTYPE' whose value is the GNU-style
6796 `cpu-company-system' system description as set by configure. (The
6797 values of MACHTYPE and HOSTTYPE should really be swapped.)
6799 aa. The `ulimit' builtin now allows the maximum virtual memory size to be
6800 set via setrlimit(2) if RLIMIT_VMEM is defined.
6802 bb. `bash -nc 'command'' no longer runs `command'.
6804 2. Changes to Readline
6806 a. Fixed a typo in the code that checked for FIONREAD in input.c.
6808 b. Fixed a bug in the code that outputs keybindings, so things like C-\
6809 are quoted properly.
6811 c. Fixed a bug in the inputrc file parsing code to handle the problems
6812 caused by inputrc files created from the output of `bind -p' in
6813 previous versions of bash. The problem was due to the bug fixed
6816 d. Readline no longer turns off the terminal's meta key, and turns it on
6817 once the first time it's called.
6819 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6820 This file documents the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha2,
6821 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha.
6825 a. The shell no longer thinks directories are executable.
6827 b. `disown' has a new option, `h', which inhibits the resending of SIGHUP
6828 but does not remove the job from the jobs table.
6830 c. The varargs functions in error.c now use ANSI-C `stdarg' if available.
6832 d. The build process now treats the `build version' in .build as local to
6833 the build directory, so different versions built from the same source
6834 tree have different `build versions'.
6836 e. Some problems with the grammar have been fixed. (It used `list' in a few
6837 productions where `compound_list' was needed. A `list' must be terminated
6838 with a newline or semicolon; a `compound_list' need not be.)
6840 f. A fix was made to keep `wait' from hanging when waiting for all background
6843 g. `bash --help' now writes its output to stdout, like the GNU Coding Standards
6844 specify, and includes the machine type (the value of MACHTYPE).
6846 h. `bash --version' now prints more information and exits successfully, like
6847 the GNU Coding Standards specify.
6849 i. The output of `time' and `times' now prints fractional seconds with three
6850 places after the decimal point.
6852 j. A bug that caused process substitutions to screw up the pipeline printed
6853 by `jobs' was fixed.
6855 k. Fixes were made to the code that implements $'...' and $"..." so they
6858 l. The process substitution code now opens named pipes for reading with
6859 O_NONBLOCK to avoid hanging.
6861 m. Fixes were made to the trap code so the shell cleans up correctly if the
6862 trap command contains a `return' and we're executing a function or
6863 sourcing a script with `.'.
6865 n. Fixes to doc/Makefile.in so that it doesn't try to remake all of the
6866 documentation (ps, dvi, etc.) on a `make install'.
6868 o. Fixed an auto-increment error that caused bash -c args to sometimes dump
6871 p. Fixed a bug that caused $HISTIGNORE to fail when the history line
6872 contained globbing characters.
6874 2. Changes to Readline
6876 a. There is a new string variable, rl_library_version, available for use by
6877 applications. The current value is "2.1".
6879 b. A bug encountered when expand-tilde was enabled and file completion was
6880 attempted on a word beginning with `~/' was fixed.
6882 c. A slight change was made to the incremental search termination behavior.
6883 ESC still terminates the search, but if input is pending or arrives
6884 within 0.1 seconds (on systems with select(2)), it is used as a prefix
6885 character. This is intented to allow users to terminate searches with
6886 the arrow keys and get the behavior they expect.