1 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.3-beta, and the
2 previous version, bash-4.3-alpha.
6 a. Fixed a bug in the prompt directory name "trimming" code that caused
7 memory corruption and garbled the results.
9 b. Fixed a bug that caused single quotes that resulted from $'...' quoting
10 in the replacement portion of a double-quoted ${word/pat/rep} expansion
11 to be treated as quote characters.
13 c. Fixed a bug that caused assignment statements preceding a command word to
14 result in assignment statements following a declaration command to not be
15 expanded like assignment statements.
17 d. Fixed a bug with variable search order in the presence of local variables
18 with the same name as variables in the temporary environment supplied to
21 e. Fixed a bug that caused constructs like 1<(2) to be interpreted as process
22 substitutions even in an arithmetic context.
24 f. Fixed several cases where `invisible' variables (variables with attributes
25 but no values, which are technically unset) were treated incorrectly.
27 g. Fixed a bug that caused group commands in pipelines that were not the
28 last element to not run the EXIT trap.
30 h. Fixed a bug that caused `unset -n' to not unset a nameref variable in
33 i. Fixed the nameref circular reference checking to be less strict and only
34 disallow a nameref variable with the same value as its name at the global
37 j. Fixed a bug that caused trap handlers to be executed recursively,
38 corrupting internal data structures.
40 k. Fixed a bug that could result in bash not compiling if certain options were
43 l. Fixed a bug that caused the arithmetic expansion code to attempt variable
44 assignments when operator precedence prohibited them.
46 m. Word expansions like ${foo##bar} now understand indirect variable references.
48 n. Fixed a bug that caused `declare -fp name' to not display a function
51 o. Fixed a bug that caused asynchronous child processes to modify the stdin
52 file pointer when bash was using it to read a script, which modified the
53 parent's value as well.
55 2. Changes to Readline
57 a. Fixed a bug in vi mode that caused the arrow keys to set the saved last
58 vi-mode command to the wrong value.
60 b. Fixed a bug that caused double-quoted strings to be scanned incorrectly
61 when being used as the value of a readline variable assignment.
63 c. Fixed a bug with vi mode that prevented `.' from repeating a command
64 entered on a previous line (command).
66 d. Fixed a bug that could cause completion to core dump if it was interrupted
69 e. Readline now sends the meta-key enable string to the terminal if the
70 terminal has been successfully initialized.
72 f. Readline now calls the signal hook after resizing the terminal when it
75 g. Fixed a bug that could cause the history list code to perform an out-of-
76 bounds array reference if the history list is empty.
78 3. New Features in Bash
80 a. Shells started to run process substitutions now run any trap set on EXIT.
82 b. There is now a configure-time option to enable the globasciiranges option
85 c. The read builtin now checks its first variable argument for validity before
86 trying to read any input.
88 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
89 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.3-alpha,
90 and the previous version, bash-4.2-release.
94 a. Fixed several bugs concerning incomplete bracket expressions in filename
95 generation (globbing) patterns.
97 b. Fixed a bug with single quotes and WORD in ${param op WORD} when running
100 c. Fixed a bug that caused the pattern removal and pattern substitution word
101 expansions and case statement word expansion to not match the empty string.
103 d. Fixed a bug that caused the tzset() function to not work after changing
104 the TZ enviroment variable.
106 e. Fixed a bug that caused the RHS of an assignment statement to undergo
107 word splitting when it contained an unquoted $@.
109 f. Fixed bugs that caused the shell to not react to a SIGINT sent while
110 waiting for a child process to exit.
112 g. Bash doesn't try to run things in a signal handler context when it gets a
113 signal (SIGINT/SIGHUP/etc) while reading input using readline but still
114 be responsive to terminating signals.
116 h. Fixed a bug that caused bash to go into an infinite loop if a filename
117 to be matched contained an invalid multibyte character.
119 i. Fixed a bug that caused PS4 to end up being truncated if it is longer
122 j. Fixed a bug that caused brace expansion to not skip over double-quoted
123 command substitution.
125 k. System-specific updates for: DJGPP, HP/UX, Mac OS X
127 l. Fixed a bug in displaying commands that caused redirections to be associated
128 with the wrong part of the command.
130 m. Fixed the coproc cleanup to unset the appropriate shell variables when a
133 n. Fixed a bug that caused `fc' to dump core due to incorrect calculation of
134 the last history entry.
136 o. Added workarounds for FreeBSD's implementation of faccessat/eaccess and
139 p. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not match patterns containing
142 q. Fixed a bug that could result in doubled error messages when the `printf'
143 builtin got a write error.
145 r. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not correctly expand words containing
146 multiple consecutive quoted empty strings (""""""aa).
148 s. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not correctly parse multi-line
149 process substitutions containing comments and quoted strings.
151 t. Fixed a problem with the bash malloc's internal idea of the top of the
152 memory heap that resulted in incorrect decisions to try to reduce the
153 break and give memory back to the kernel.
155 u. There are changes to the expansions peformed on compound array assignments,
156 in an effort to make foo=( [ind1]=bar [ind2]=baz ) identical to
157 foo[ind1]=bar foo[ind2]=baz.
159 v. Bash now reports an error if `read -a name' is used when `name' is an
160 existing associative array.
162 w. Fixed a bug that allowed an attempted assignment to a readonly variable
163 in an arithmetic expression to not return failure.
165 x. Fixed several bugs that caused completion functions to be invoked even when
166 the cursor was before the first word in the command.
168 y. Fixed a bug that caused parsing a command substitution to overwrite the
169 parsing state associated with the complete input line.
171 z. Fixed several bugs with the built-in snprintf replacement and field widths
174 aa. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect offset calculations and input buffer
175 corruption when reading files longer than 2^31 bytes.
177 bb. Fixed several bugs where bash performed arithmetic evaluation in contexts
178 where evaluation is suppressed.
180 cc. Fixed a bug that caused bash to close FIFOs used for process substitution
181 too early when a shell function was executing, but protect against using
182 all file descriptors when the shell functions are invoked inside loops.
184 dd. Added checks for printable (and non-printable) multibyte characters for
185 use in error messages.
187 ee. Fixed a bug that caused ^O (operate-and-get-next) to not work correctly
188 at the end of the history list.
190 ff. Fixed a bug that caused command-oriented history to incorrectly combine
191 here documents into one line.
193 gg. Fixed a bug that caused importing SHELLOPTS from the environment into a
194 Posix-mode shell to print an error message and refuse to parse it.
196 hh. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to delete an extra history entry when
199 ii. Fixed a bug that caused floating-point exceptions and overflow errors
200 for the / and % arithmetic operators when using INTMAX_MIN and -1.
202 jj. Fixed a bug that caused parsing errors when reading an arithmetic for
203 loop inside a command substitution.
205 kk. Fixed a bug that caused a readonly function to be unset when unset was
206 called without the -f or -v option.
208 ll. Fixed several bugs in the code that quotes characters special to regular
209 expressions when used in a quoted string on the RHS of the =~ operator
212 mm. Fixed a bug that caused redirections to fail because the file descriptor
213 limit was set to a value less than 10.
215 nn. Fixed a bug that caused the `read' builtin to execute code in a signal
216 handler context if read timed out.
218 oo. Fixed a bug that caused extended globbing patterns to not match files
219 beginning with `.' correctly when a `.' was explicitly supplied in the
222 pp. Fixed a bug that caused key sequences longer than two characters to not
223 work when used with `bind -x'.
225 qq. Fixed a bug that resulted in redefined functions having the wrong source
226 file names in BASH_SOURCE.
228 rr. Fixed a bug that caused the read builtin to assign null strings to variables
229 when using `read -N', which caused core dumps when referenced
231 ss. Fixed a bug that caused `bash -m script' to not enable job control while
234 tt. Fixed a bug that caused `printf -v var' to dump core when used with the
237 uu. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to exit with the wrong status if -e was
238 active and the shell exited on a substitution error.
240 vv. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to seg fault if an array variable with
241 the same name as an existing associative array was implicitly created by
242 an assignment (declare a[n]=b).
244 ww. Fixed a bug that caused a redirection to misbehave if the number specified
245 for a file descriptor overflows an intmax_t.
247 xx. Fixed several bugs with the handling of valid and invalid unicode character
248 values when used with the \u and \U escape sequences to printf and $'...'.
250 yy. Fixed a bug that caused tildes to not be escaped in expanded filenames,
251 making them subject to later expansion.
253 zz. When using the pattern substitution word expansion, bash now runs the
254 replacement string through quote removal, since it allows quotes in that
255 string to act as escape characters. This is not backwards compatible, so
256 it can be disabled by setting the bash compatibility mode to 4.2.
258 aaa. Fixed the rest of the cases where the shell runs non-allowed code in a
259 signal handler context.
261 bbb. Fixed a bug that caused spurious DEL characters (\177) to appear in
262 double-quoted expansion where the RHS is evaluated to the empty string.
264 ccc. Fixed a bug that caused the use of the shell's internal random number
265 generator for temporary file names to perturb the random number
268 ddd. Fixed several bugs that caused `declare -g' to not set the right global
269 variables or to misbehave when declaring global indexed arrays.
271 eee. Fixed a logic bug that caused extended globbing in a multibyte locale to
272 cause failures when using the pattern substititution word expansions.
274 fff. Fixed a bug that caused the `lastpipe' option to corrupt the file
275 descriptor used to read the script.
277 ggg. Fixed a bug that causes the shell to delete DEL characters in the
278 expanded value of variables used in the same quoted string as variables
279 that expand to nothing.
281 hhh. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to assign the wrong value from an
282 assignment like (( x=7 )) when `x' was an existing array variable.
284 iii. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to misbehave when generating sequences
285 and the boundary values overflow an intmax_t.
287 jjj. Fixed a bug caused expansion errors if an expansion of "$@" appeared
288 next to another expansion (e.g.. "${@}${x}").
290 kkk. Fixed a potential buffer overflow bug when performing /dev/fd expansion.
292 lll. Fixed a bug that resulted in an extra semicolon being added to compound
293 assignments when they were added to the history list.
295 mmm. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to read one extra line from the input.
297 nnn. Fixed a bug that caused the mail checking code to use uninitialized
300 ooo. Fixed a bug that prevented history timestamps from being saved if the
301 history comment character is unset.
303 ppp. Fixed a bug that caused the case-modifying expansions to not work with
304 multibyte characters.
306 qqq. Fixed a bug that caused the edit-and-execute bindable readline command
307 to see the wrong data if invoked in the middle of a multi-line quoted
310 rrr. Fixed a bug that resulted in the shell returning the wrong exit status
311 for a background command on systems that recycle PIDs very quickly.
313 sss. Fixed a bug that caused asynchronous group commands to not run any EXIT
314 trap defined in the body of the command.
316 ttt. Fixed a bug that caused `eval "... ; return"' to not clean up properly.
318 uuu. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core if `read' reads an escaped
319 IFS whitespace character.
321 vvv. Fixed a bug that caused BASH_COMMAND to be set to an incorrect value when
322 executing a (...) subshell.
324 www. Fixed a couple of pointer aliasing bugs with the token string in arithmetic
327 xxx. Fixed a bug with parsing multi-line command substitutions when reading
328 the `do' keyword followed by whitespace.
330 yyy. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to seg fault if the time given to the
331 printf %(...)T format overflowed the value accepted by localtime(3).
333 zzz. Fixed a problem with displaying help topics in two columns when the
334 translated text contained multibyte characters.
336 aaaa. Fixed a bug with the extended globbing pattern matcher where a `*' was
337 followed by a negated extended glob pattern.
339 bbbb. Fixed a race condition with short-lived coproc creation and reaping that
340 caused the child process to be reaped before the various coproc shell
341 variables were initialized.
343 cccc. Fixed a bug where turning off `errexit' in command substitution subshells
344 was not reflected in $SHELLOPTS.
346 dddd. Partially fixed an inconsistency in how the shell treated shell
347 functions run from an EXIT trap.
349 eeee. Fixed a bug in how the shell invalidated FIFOs used for process
350 substitution when executing a pipeline (once rather than in every child).
352 ffff. Fixed a bug that occurred when expanding a special variable ($@, $*)
353 within double quotes and the expansion resulted in an empty string.
355 gggg. Fixed bugs with executing a SIGCHLD trap handler to make sure that it's
356 executed once per exited child.
358 hhhh. Fixed a bug that caused `declare' and `test' to find variables that
359 had been given attributes but not assigned values. Such variables are
362 iiii. Fixed a bug that caused commands in process substitutions to not look in
363 the local temporary environment when performing word expansions.
365 jjjj. Fixed several problems with globstar expansions (**/**) returning null
366 filenames and multiple instances of the same pathname.
368 kkkk. Fixed an oversight that did not allow the exit status of `coproc' to
369 be inverted using `!'.
371 llll. Fixed a bug that caused the -e option to be re-enabled using `set -e'
372 even when executing in a context where -e is ignored.
374 mmmm. Fixed a (mostly theoretical) bug with input lines longer than SIZE_MAX.
376 nnnn. Fixed a bug that could result in double evaluation of command
377 substitutions when they appear in failed redirections.
379 oooo. Fixed a bug that could cause seg faults during `mapfile' callbacks if
380 the callback unsets the array variable mapfile is using.
382 pppp. Fixed several problems with variable assignments using ${var:=value}
383 when the variable assignment is supposed to have side effects.
385 qqqq. Fixed a bug that caused a failure of an assignment statement preceding a
386 builtin caused the next invocation of a special builtin to exit the shell.
388 rrrr. Fixed several problems with IFS when it appears in the temporary environment
389 and is used in redirections.
391 ssss. Fixed a problem that caused IFS changes using ${IFS:=value} to modify
392 how preceding expansions were split.
394 tttt. Fixed a problem that caused subshells to not run an EXIT trap they set.
396 uuuu. Fixed a problem that caused shells started in posix mode to attempt to
397 import shell functions with invalid names from the environment. We now
400 vvvv. Worked around a kernel problem that caused SIGCHLD to interrupt open(2)
401 on a FIFO used for process substitution, even if the SIGCHLD handler was
402 installed with the SA_RESTART flag.
404 wwww. Fixed a problem that resulted in inconsistent expansion of $* and ${a[*]}.
406 xxxx. Fixed a problem that caused `read -t' to crash when interrupted by
409 yyyy. Fixed a problem that caused pattern removal to fail randomly because the
410 pattern matcher read beyond the end of a string.
412 zzzz. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when shell functions tried to create
413 local shadow copies of special variables like GROUPS.
415 aaaaa. Fixed a bug that caused SIGTERM to be occasionally lost by children of
416 interactive shells when it arrived before the child process reset the
417 handler from SIG_DFL.
419 bbbbb. Fixed a bug that caused redirections like <&n- to leave file descriptor
420 n closed if executed with a builtin command.
422 ccccc. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect completion quoting when completing a
423 word containing a globbing character with `show-all-if-ambiguous' set.
425 ddddd. Fixed a bug that caused printf's %q format specifier not to quote a
426 tilde even if it appeared in a location where it would be subject to
429 2. Changes to Readline
431 a. Fixed a bug that did not allow the `dd', `cc', or `yy' vi editing mode
432 commands to work on the entire line.
434 b. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay problems with prompts longer than 128
435 characters and history searches.
437 c. Fixed a bug that caused readline to try and run code to modify its idea
438 of the screen size in a signal handler context upon receiving a SIGWINCH.
440 d. Fixed a bug that caused the `meta' key to be enabled beyond the duration
441 of an individual call top readline().
443 e. Added a workaround for a wcwidth bug in Mac OS X that caused readline's
444 redisplay to mishandle zero-width combining characters.
446 f. Fixed a bug that caused readline to `forget' part of a key sequence when
447 a multiple-key sequence caused it to break out of an incremental search.
449 g. Fixed bugs that caused readline to execute code in a signal handler
450 context if interrupted while reading from the file system during completion.
452 h. Fixed a bug that caused readline to `forget' part of a key sequence when
453 reading an unbound multi-character key sequence.
455 i. Fixed a bug that caused Readline's signal handlers to be installed beyond
456 the bounds of a single call to readline().
458 j. Fixed a bug that caused the `.' command to not redo the most recent `R'
461 k. Fixed a bug that caused ignoring case in completion matches to result in
462 readline using the wrong match.
464 l. Paren matching now works in vi insert mode.
466 m. Fix menu-completion to make show-all-if-ambiguous and menu-complete-display-prefix
469 n. Fixed a bug that didn't allow the `cc', `dd', or `yy' commands to be redone
472 o. Fixed a bug that caused the filename comparison code to not compare
473 multibyte characters correctly when using case-sensitive or case-mapping
476 p. Fixed the input reading loop to call the input hook function only when there
477 is no terminal input available.
479 q. Fixed a bug that caused binding a macro to a multi-character key sequence
480 where the sequence and macro value share a common prefix to not perform
481 the macro replacement.
483 r. Fixed several redisplay errors with multibyte characters and prompts
484 containing invisible characters when using horizontal scrolling.
486 s. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when trying to overwrite
487 existing characters using multibyte characters.
489 3. New Features in Bash
491 a. The `helptopic' completion action now maps to all the help topics, not just
494 b. The `help' builtin no longer does prefix substring matching, so `help read'
495 does not match `readonly'.
497 c. The shell can be compiled to not display a message about processes that
498 terminate due to SIGTERM.
500 d. Non-interactive shells now react to the setting of checkwinsize and set
501 LINES and COLUMNS after a foreground job exits.
503 e. There is a new shell option, `globasciiranges', which, when set to on,
504 forces globbing range comparisons to use character ordering as if they
505 were run in the C locale.
507 f. There is a new shell option, `direxpand', which makes filename completion
508 expand variables in directory names in the way bash-4.1 did.
510 g. In Posix mode, the `command' builtin does not change whether or not a
511 builtin it shadows is treated as an assignment builtin.
513 h. The `return' and `exit' builtins accept negative exit status arguments.
515 i. The word completion code checks whether or not a filename containing a
516 shell variable expands to a directory name and appends `/' to the word
517 as appropriate. The same code expands shell variables in command names
518 when performing command completion.
520 j. In Posix mode, it is now an error to attempt to define a shell function
521 with the same name as a Posix special builtin.
523 k. When compiled for strict Posix conformance, history expansion is disabled
526 l. The history expansion character (!) does not cause history expansion when
527 followed by the closing quote in a double-quoted string.
529 m. `complete' and its siblings compgen/compopt now takes a new `-o noquote'
530 option to inhibit quoting of the completions.
532 n. Setting HISTSIZE to a value less than zero causes the history list to be
533 unlimited (setting it 0 zero disables the history list).
535 o. Setting HISTFILESIZE to a value less than zero causes the history file size
536 to be unlimited (setting it to 0 causes the history file to be truncated
539 p. The `read' builtin now skips NUL bytes in the input.
541 q. There is a new `bind -X' option to print all key sequences bound to Unix
544 r. When in Posix mode, `read' is interruptible by a trapped signal. After
545 running the trap handler, read returns 128+signal and throws away any
546 partially-read input.
548 s. The command completion code skips whitespace and assignment statements
549 before looking for the command name word to be completed.
551 t. The build process has a new mechanism for constructing separate help files
552 that better reflects the current set of compilation options.
554 u. The -nt and -ot options to test now work with files with nanosecond
555 timestamp resolution.
557 v. The shell saves the command history in any shell for which history is
558 enabled and HISTFILE is set, not just interactive shells.
560 w. The shell has `nameref' variables and new -n(/+n) options to declare and
561 unset to use them, and a `test -R' option to test for them.
563 x. The shell now allows assigning, referencing, and unsetting elements of
564 indexed arrays using negative subscripts (a[-1]=2, echo ${a[-1]}) which
565 count back from the last element of the array.
567 y. The {x}<word redirection feature now allows words like {array[ind]} and
568 can use variables with special meanings to the shell (e.g., BASH_XTRACEFD).
570 z. There is a new CHILD_MAX special shell variable; its value controls the
571 number of exited child statues the shell remembers.
573 aa. There is a new configuration option (--enable-direxpand-default) that
574 causes the `direxpand' shell option to be enabled by default.
576 bb. Bash does not do anything special to ensure that the file descriptor
577 assigned to X in {x}<foo remains open after the block containing it
580 cc. The `wait' builtin has a new `-n' option to wait for the next child to
583 dd. The `printf' %(...)T format specifier now uses the current time if no
584 argument is supplied.
586 ee. There is a new variable, BASH_COMPAT, that controls the current shell
589 ff. The `popd' builtin now treats additional arguments as errors.
591 gg. The brace expansion code now treats a failed sequence expansion as a
592 simple string and will continue to expand brace terms in the remainder
595 4. New Features in Readline
597 a. Readline is now more responsive to SIGHUP and other fatal signals when
598 reading input from the terminal or performing word completion but no
599 longer attempts to run any not-allowable functions from a signal handler
602 b. There are new bindable commands to search the history for the string of
603 characters between the beginning of the line and the point
604 (history-substring-search-forward, history-substring-search-backward)
606 c. Readline allows quoted strings as the values of variables when setting
607 them with `set'. As a side effect, trailing spaces and tabs are ignored
608 when setting a string variable's value.
610 d. The history library creates a backup of the history file when writing it
611 and restores the backup on a write error.
613 e. New application-settable variable: rl_filename_stat_hook: a function called
614 with a filename before using it in a call to stat(2). Bash uses it to
615 expand shell variables so things like $HOME/Downloads have a slash
618 f. New bindable function `print-last-kbd-macro', prints the most-recently-
619 defined keyboard macro in a reusable format.
621 g. New user-settable variable `colored-stats', enables use of colored text
622 to denote file types when displaying possible completions (colored analog
625 h. New user-settable variable `keyseq-timout', acts as an inter-character
626 timeout when reading input or incremental search strings.
628 i. New application-callable function: rl_clear_history. Clears the history list
629 and frees all readline-associated private data.
631 j. New user-settable variable, show-mode-in-prompt, adds a characters to the
632 beginning of the prompt indicating the current editing mode.
634 k. New application-settable variable: rl_input_available_hook; function to be
635 called when readline detects there is data available on its input file
638 l. Readline calls an application-set event hook (rl_signal_event_hook) after
639 it gets a signal while reading input (read returns -1/EINTR but readline
640 does not handle the signal immediately) to allow the application to handle
641 or otherwise note it. Not currently called for SIGHUP or SIGTERM.
643 m. If the user-settable variable `history-size' is set to a value less than
644 0, the history list size is unlimited.
646 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
647 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-release,
648 and the previous version, bash-4.2-rc2.
652 a. Fixed a bug that caused some variables to be clobbered by a longjmp,
653 resulting in stack corruption.
655 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
656 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-rc2,
657 and the previous version, bash-4.2-rc1.
661 a. Changes to bash_directory_completion_hook so that it's assigned to the
662 readline rl_directory_rewrite_hook variable, which modifies the directory
663 name passed to opendir without modifying the directory name the user
666 b. Fixed bug in select builtin that caused it to not terminate correctly if
667 the read timed out due to $TMOUT.
669 c. Fixed a problem that resulted in non-repeatable sequences of random
670 numbers when RANDOM=0.
672 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
673 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-rc1,
674 and the previous version, bash-4.2-beta.
678 a. Fixed a bug that caused some redirection errors to leak file descriptors.
680 b. Fixed a bug that caused unary `+' and `-' arithmetic operators to have a
681 higher precedence than unary `!' and `~'.
683 c. Fixed a bug that caused simple commands in a pipeline to affect the exit
684 status ($?) seen by subsequent pipeline commands.
686 d. A number of cygwin-specific changes to avoid the use of text-mode files
687 and file access, and to make sure that \r is handled correctly.
689 e. Fixed a bug that caused the read builtin to not return failure if an
690 attempt is made to assign to a readonly variable.
692 f. Fixed a bug that caused some builtin usage messages to not be translated.
694 g. Fixed a bug that caused the getopts builtin to not return failure if an
695 attempt is made to assign to a readonly variable. Now it returns 2.
697 h. Fixed the cd and pwd builtins to return failure if PWD is readonly and
698 cannot be assigned to.
700 i. Added code to check the return value of access(2) on Solaris systems,
701 since it returns success for executable tests (e.g., `test -x') when
702 run by root, even if the file permissions don't allow execution.
704 2. Changes to Readline
706 a. Fixed a bug that caused directory names in words to be completed to not
707 be dequoted correctly.
709 3. New Features in Bash
711 4. New Features in Readline
713 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
714 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-beta,
715 and the previous version, bash-4.2-alpha.
719 a. Fixed a bug that caused the \W prompt string escape to not add a closing
722 b. Fixed a bug that caused partially-quoted words that were not subject to
723 word splitting to retained quoted NULLs.
725 c. Added considerable efficiency speedups when pattern matching in multibyte
726 locales by skipping multibyte character functions where possible.
728 d. Added considerable speedups to variable expansion when in multibyte locales.
730 e. Fixed a bug that caused the expansion of $* when there are no positional
731 parameters to cause the shell to dump core when used in a pattern
734 f. Fixed a bug that caused variable expansions preceding regular builtins to
735 not change the shell environment during their execution.
737 2. Changes to Readline
739 a. Fixed a bug that made an explicit argument of 0 to yank-last-arg behave
740 as if it were a negative argument.
742 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
743 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.2-alpha,
744 and the previous version, bash-4.1-release.
748 a. Fixed a bug in the parser when processing alias expansions containing
751 b. Fixed a memory leak in associative array expansion.
753 c. Fixed a bug that caused quoted here-strings to be requoted when printed.
755 d. Fixed a bug in arithmetic expansion that caused the index in an array
756 expansion to be evaluated twice under certain circumstances.
758 e. Fixed several bugs with the expansion and display of variables that have
759 been given attributes but not values and are technically unset.
761 f. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when using filename completion that
762 expands to a filename containing a globbing character.
764 g. Fixed a bug that caused assignment statements preceding a special builtin
765 when running in Posix mode to not persist after the builtin completed
766 when the special builtin was executed in a shell function without any
769 h. Fixed a bug that caused a command to remain in the hash table even after
770 `hash command' did not find anything if there was already an existing
773 i. Fixed several bugs caused by executing unsafe functions from a signal
774 handler in the cases where a signal handler is executed immediately
775 rather than setting a flag for later execution.
777 j. Fixed a bug that caused some internal flag variables to be set
778 incorrectly if `read -t' timed out.
780 k. Fixed a Posix compatibility issue by making sure that a backslash escaping
781 a `}' within a double-quoted ${...} parameter expansion is removed as part
782 of the parameter expansion.
784 l. Fixed a bug that caused execution of a trap to overwrite PIPESTATUS.
786 m. Fixed a bug that caused here documents to not be displayed correctly
787 when attached to commands inside compound commands.
789 n. Fixed a bug that caused the printf builtin to use the wrong precision
790 when using the `*' modifier.
792 o. Fixed a bug that caused an arriving SIGCHLD to interrupt output functions
793 like those invoked by echo or printf.
795 p. Changed to use a more robust mechanism than eaccess(2) when test is
796 checking filenames for execution permission.
798 q. Fixed a bug that caused spurious semicolons to be added into the command
799 history in certain cases.
801 r. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to free non-allocated memory when
802 unsetting element 0 of an associative array after it was assigned
805 s. Fixed a bug that could cause the shell to dump core if using the `v'
806 vi editing command on a multi-line command.
808 t. Fixed a bug that left FIFOs opened by process substitutions open long
809 enough to potentially cause file descriptor exhaustion when running a
810 shell function or shell builtin.
812 u. Fixed a bug that caused the history expansion functions to not recognize
813 process substitution or extended glob patterns as single words.
815 v. Fixed a bug that caused restricted shells to set a restricted command's
816 exit status incorrectly.
818 w. Fixed a bug that caused bash to ignore the wrong set of filenames when
819 completing a command using the `complete-filename' readline command.
821 x. Fixed a bug that caused a -PID argument following a -s sig or -n sig to
822 not be interpreted as a signal specification.
824 y. Changed posix-mode behavior of a parse error in a `.' script or `eval'
825 command to exit the shell under Posix-specified conditions. Previous
826 versions printed a warning.
828 z. Fixed a bug in \W prompt expansion that resulted in incorrect expansion
829 in the event of overlapping strings.
831 aa. Fixed a bug that caused the := parameter expansion operator to return the
832 wrong value as the result of the expansion.
834 bb. When in Posix mode, a single quote is not treated specially in a
835 double-quoted ${...} expansion, unless the expansion operator is
836 # or % or the non-Posix `//', `^', and `,'. In particular, it does
837 not define a new quoting context. This is from Posix interpretation 221.
839 cc. Fixed a bug that inadvertently allowed program names containing slashes
840 to be entered into the command hash table.
842 dd. Fixed a bug that caused the select builtin to incorrectly compute the
843 display width of the arguments in the presence of multibyte characters.
845 ee. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not change the xtrace file descriptor if
846 BASH_XTRACEFD was found in the shell environment at startup.
848 ff. Fixed a memory leak in the pattern removal parameter expansion.
850 gg. Fixed a bug that caused SIGINT to fail to interrupt a nested loop if the
851 loop was in a pipeline.
853 hh. Fixed a problem in $(...) parsing that caused the parser to add an extra
854 space to a here-document delimiter if the first word contained a `/'.
856 ii. Fixed a bug that caused functions defined with the `function' reserved
857 word to require braces around the function body.
859 jj. Fixed a bug that caused bash to dump core when a variable expansion being
860 used as an array subscript failed.
862 kk. Fixed a bug that caused bash to dump core if the case-modification
863 expansions were used on a variable with a null value.
865 ll. Fixed a bug that caused partially-quoted strings to be split incorrectly
866 if a variable with a null value was expanded within double quotes.
868 mm. The pattern substitution word expansion has been sped up dramatically
869 when running in a locale with multibyte characters.
871 nn. Fixed a bug that caused history -a to not write the correct lines to
872 the history file if all the new lines in the history list were added
873 since the last time the history file was read or written.
875 oo. Fixed a bug that caused completion of a word with an unclosed `` command
876 substitution to set the prompt incorrectly.
878 pp. Fixed a bug that caused extended globbing patterns in $HISTIGNORE or
879 $GLOBIGNORE to be incorrectly scanned.
881 qq. Fixed a bug caused by closing file descriptors 3-20 on shell startup. The
882 shell now sets them to close-on-exec.
884 rr. Fixed a bug that caused the exit status of `exec file' to be set incorrectly
885 if `file' was a directory.
887 ss. Fixed a bug in the `.' builtin to make a non-interactive posix-mode shell
888 exit if the file argument to `.' is not found. Prefixing exec with
889 `command' makes the shell not exit. Posix requires this behavior.
891 tt. Fixed a bug that caused `sh -c 'command exec; exit 1' to hang.
893 uu. Fixed a bug in $(...) command substitution parsing that caused the shell
894 to treat backslash-newline incorrectly when parsing a comment.
896 vv. Fixed bug that caused brace expansion sequence generation to misbehave
897 when supplied integers greater than 2**31 - 1.
899 ww. Fixed a bug that caused failure to save file descriptors for redirections
900 to corrupt shell file descriptors.
902 xx. Fixed a bug that caused bash-forward-shellword to not correctly handle
905 2. Changes to Readline
907 a. Fixed a bug that caused the unconverted filename to be added to the list of
908 completions when the application specified filename conversion functions.
910 b. Fixed a bug that caused the wrong filename to be passed to opendir when the
911 application has specified a filename dequoting function.
913 c. Fixed a bug when repeating a character search in vi mode in the case where
914 there was no search to repeat.
916 d. When show-all-if-ambiguous is set, the completion routines no longer insert
917 a common match prefix that is shorter than the text being completed.
919 e. The full set of vi editing commands may now be used in callback mode.
921 f. Fixed a bug that caused readline to not update its idea of the terminal
922 dimensions while running in `no-echo' mode.
924 h. Fixed a bug that caused readline to dump core if an application called
925 rl_prep_terminal without setting rl_instream.
927 i. Fixed a bug that caused meta-prefixed characters bound to incremental
928 search forward or backward to not be recognized if they were typed
931 j. The incremental search code treats key sequences that map to the same
932 functions as (default) ^G, ^W, and ^Y as equivalent to those characters.
934 k. Fixed a bug in menu-complete that caused it to misbehave with large
937 l. Fixed a bug that caused vi-mode yank-last-arg to ring the bell when invoked
938 at the end of the line.
940 3. New Features in Bash
942 a. `exec -a foo' now sets $0 to `foo' in an executable shell script without a
945 b. Subshells begun to execute command substitutions or run shell functions or
946 builtins in subshells do not reset trap strings until a new trap is
947 specified. This allows $(trap) to display the caller's traps and the
948 trap strings to persist until a new trap is set.
950 c. `trap -p' will now show signals ignored at shell startup, though their
951 disposition still cannot be modified.
953 d. $'...', echo, and printf understand \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX escape sequences.
955 e. declare/typeset has a new `-g' option, which creates variables in the
956 global scope even when run in a shell function.
958 f. test/[/[[ have a new -v variable unary operator, which returns success if
959 `variable' has been set.
961 g. Posix parsing changes to allow `! time command' and multiple consecutive
962 instances of `!' (which toggle) and `time' (which have no cumulative
965 h. Posix change to allow `time' as a command by itself to print the elapsed
966 user, system, and real times for the shell and its children.
968 j. $((...)) is always parsed as an arithmetic expansion first, instead of as
969 a potential nested command substitution, as Posix requires.
971 k. A new FUNCNEST variable to allow the user to control the maximum shell
972 function nesting (recursive execution) level.
974 l. The mapfile builtin now supplies a third argument to the callback command:
975 the line about to be assigned to the supplied array index.
977 m. The printf builtin has a new %(fmt)T specifier, which allows time values
978 to use strftime-like formatting.
980 n. There is a new `compat41' shell option.
982 o. The cd builtin has a new Posix-mandated `-e' option.
984 p. Negative subscripts to indexed arrays, previously errors, now are treated
985 as offsets from the maximum assigned index + 1.
987 q. Negative length specifications in the ${var:offset:length} expansion,
988 previously errors, are now treated as offsets from the end of the variable.
990 r. Parsing change to allow `time -p --'.
992 s. Posix-mode parsing change to not recognize `time' as a keyword if the
993 following token begins with a `-'. This means no more Posix-mode
994 `time -p'. Posix interpretation 267.
996 t. There is a new `lastpipe' shell option that runs the last command of a
997 pipeline in the current shell context. The lastpipe option has no
998 effect if job control is enabled.
1000 u. History expansion no longer expands the `$!' variable expansion.
1002 v. Posix mode shells no longer exit if a variable assignment error occurs
1003 with an assignment preceding a command that is not a special builtin.
1005 w. Non-interactive mode shells exit if -u is enabled and an attempt is made
1006 to use an unset variable with the % or # expansions, the `//', `^', or
1007 `,' expansions, or the parameter length expansion.
1009 x. Posix-mode shells use the argument passed to `.' as-is if a $PATH search
1010 fails, effectively searching the current directory. Posix-2008 change.
1012 4. New Features in Readline
1014 a. The history library does not try to write the history filename in the
1015 current directory if $HOME is unset. This closes a potential security
1016 problem if the application does not specify a history filename.
1018 b. New bindable variable `completion-display-width' to set the number of
1019 columns used when displaying completions.
1021 c. New bindable variable `completion-case-map' to cause case-insensitive
1022 completion to treat `-' and `_' as identical.
1024 d. There are new bindable vi-mode command names to avoid readline's case-
1025 insensitive matching not allowing them to be bound separately.
1027 e. New bindable variable `menu-complete-display-prefix' causes the menu
1028 completion code to display the common prefix of the possible completions
1029 before cycling through the list, instead of after.
1031 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1032 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-rc,
1033 and the previous version, bash-4.1-beta.
1037 a. Fixed a bug that caused printf to not return a partial value when it
1038 encountered an error while converting an integer argument.
1040 b. Fixed a bug that caused setting one of the compatNN options to not
1041 turn off the others.
1043 c. The (undocumented) --wordexp option is no longer included by default.
1045 d. Fixed a bug in conditional command execution that caused it to not
1046 correctly ignore the exit status under certain circumstances.
1048 e. Added a configure-time check for correctly-working asprintf/snprintf.
1050 f. Fixed some problems with line number calculation and display when sourcing
1051 a file in an interactive shell.
1053 g. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when using `declare -A foo=bar'.
1055 h. Fixed a bug that caused an off-by-one error when calculating the directories
1056 to display with the PROMPT_DIRTRIM option.
1058 2. Changes to Readline
1060 a. Fixed a bug that caused applications using the callback interface to not
1061 react to SIGINT (or other signals) until another character arrived.
1063 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1064 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-beta,
1065 and the previous version, bash-4.1-alpha.
1069 a. Fixed a bug in mapfile that caused the shell to crash if it was passed the
1070 name of an associative array.
1072 b. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to incorrectly split case patterns if
1073 they contained characters in $IFS.
1075 c. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to set $? to the wrong value when using
1076 a construct ending with a variable assignment with set -x enabled and PS4
1077 containing a command substitution.
1079 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to read commands incorrectly if an
1080 expansion error occurred under certain conditions in a user-specified
1083 e. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to set $? incorrectly if a parse error
1084 occurred in an evaluation context ("eval", trap command, dot script, etc.)
1086 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt command substitution
1087 completion within a single-quoted string.
1089 g. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to insert an extra single quote during
1092 h. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash if invoked with the environment
1093 variable EMACS having a null value.
1095 i. Fixed a bug that caused bash to incorrectly report the presence of new
1096 mail in a `maildir' environment.
1098 j. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not recognize a here-document ending
1099 delimiter inside a command substitution.
1101 k. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when a a dynamic array variable
1102 was assigned a scalar value.
1104 2. Changes to Readline
1106 3. New Features in Bash
1108 a. The mapfile/readarray builtin no longer stores the commands it invokes via
1109 callbacks in the history list.
1111 b. There is a new `compat40' shopt option.
1113 c. The < and > operators to [[ do string comparisons using the current locale
1114 only if the compatibility level is greater than 40 (set to 41 by default).
1116 4. New Features in Readline
1118 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1119 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.1-alpha,
1120 and the previous version, bash-4.0-release.
1124 a. Fixed bugs in the parser involving new parsing of the commands contained
1125 in command substitution when the substitution is read.
1127 b. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing programmable
1128 completion using a shell function.
1130 c. Fixed a bug in `mapfile' that caused it to invoke callbacks at the wrong
1133 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when listing jobs in the
1136 e. Fixed several bugs encountered when reading subscripts in associative
1137 array assignments and expansions.
1139 f. Fixed a bug that under some circumstances caused an associative array to
1140 be converted to an indexed array.
1142 g. Fixed a bug that caused syntax errors and SIGINT interrupts to not set
1143 $? to a value > 128.
1145 h. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to remove FIFOs associated with process
1146 substitution inside shell functions.
1148 i. Fixed a bug that caused terminal attributes to not be reset when the
1149 `read' builtin timed out.
1151 j. Fixed a bug in brace expansion that caused unwanted zero padding of the
1154 k. Fixed a bug that prevented the |& construct from working as intended when
1155 used with a simple command with additional redirections.
1157 l. Fixed a bug with the case statment ;& terminator that caused the shell to
1158 dereference a NULL pointer.
1160 m. Fixed a bug that caused assignment statements or redirections preceding
1161 a simple command name to inhibit alias expansion.
1163 n. Fixed the behavior of `set -u' to conform to the latest Posix interpretation:
1164 every expansion of an unset variable except $@ and $* will cause the
1167 o. Fixed a bug that caused double-quoted expansions of $* inside word
1168 expansions like ${x#$*} to not expand properly when $IFS is empty.
1170 p. Fixed a bug that caused traps to set $LINENO to the wrong value when they
1173 q. Fixed a bug that caused off-by-one errors when computing history lines in
1176 r. Fixed a bug that caused some terminating signals to not exit the shell
1177 quickly enough, forcing the kernel to send the signal (e.g., SIGSEGV)
1180 s. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt to add empty lines to the
1181 history list when reading here documents.
1183 t. Made some internal changes that dramatically speeds up sequential indexed
1186 u. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to write past the end of a string when
1187 completing a double-quoted string ending in a backslash.
1189 v. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to replace too many characters when a
1190 pattern match was null in a ${foo//bar} expansion.
1192 w. Fixed bugs in the expansion of ** that caused duplicate directory names
1193 and the contents of the current directory to be omitted.
1195 x. Fixed a bug that caused $? to not be set correctly when referencing an
1196 unset variable with set -u and set -e enabled.
1198 y. Fixed a bug caused by executing an external program from the DEBUG trap
1199 while a pipeline was running. The effect was to disturb the pipeline
1200 state, occasionally causing it to hang.
1202 z. Fixed a bug that caused the ** glob expansion to dump core if it
1203 encountered an unsearchable directory.
1205 aa. Fixed a bug that caused `command -v' and `command -V' to not honor the
1206 path set by the -p option.
1208 bb. Fixed a bug that caused brace expansion to take place too soon in some
1209 compound array assignments.
1211 cc. Fixed a bug that caused programmable completion functions' changes to
1212 READLINE_POINT to not be reflected back to readline.
1214 dd. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core if a trap was executed
1215 during a shell assignment statement.
1217 ee. Fixed an off-by-one error when computing the number of positional
1218 parameters for the ${@:0:n} expansion.
1220 ff. Fixed a problem with setting COMP_CWORD for programmable completion
1221 functions that could leave it set to -1.
1223 gg. Fixed a bug that caused the ERR trap to be triggered in some cases where
1224 `set -e' would not have caused the shell to exit.
1226 hh. Fixed a bug that caused changes made by `compopt' to not persist past the
1227 completion function in which compopt was executed.
1229 ii. Fixed a bug that caused the list of hostname completions to not be cleared
1230 when HOSTNAME was unset.
1232 jj. Fixed a bug that caused variable expansion in here documents to look in
1233 any temporary environment.
1235 kk. Bash and readline can now convert file names between precomposed and
1236 decomposed Unicode on Mac OS X ("keyboard" and file system forms,
1237 respectively). This affects filename completion (using new
1238 rl_filename_rewrite_hook), globbing, and readline redisplay.
1240 ll. The ERR and EXIT traps now see a non-zero value for $? when a parser
1241 error after set -e has been enabled causes the shell to exit.
1243 mm. Fixed a bug that in brace expansion that caused zero-prefixed terms to
1244 not contain the correct number of digits.
1246 nn. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to free non-allocated memory when
1247 unsetting an associative array which had had a value implicitly assigned
1250 oo. Fixed a memory leak in the ${!prefix@} expansion.
1252 pp. Fixed a bug that caused printf to not correctly report all write errors.
1254 qq. Fixed a bug that caused single and double quotes to act as delimiters
1255 when splitting a command line into words for programmable completion.
1257 rr. Fixed a bug that caused ** globbing that caused **/path/* to match every
1258 directory, not just those matching `path'.
1260 ss. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when running `help' without
1261 arguments if the terminal width was fewer than 7 characters.
1263 2. Changes to Readline
1265 a. The SIGWINCH signal handler now avoids calling the redisplay code if
1266 one arrives while in the middle of redisplay.
1268 b. Changes to the timeout code to make sure that timeout values greater
1269 than one second are handled better.
1271 c. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code that was triggered by a prompt
1272 containing invisible characters exactly the width of the screen.
1274 d. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code encountered when running in horizontal
1277 e. Fixed a bug that prevented menu completion from properly completing
1280 f. Fixed a redisplay bug caused by a multibyte character causing a line to
1283 g. Fixed a bug that caused key sequences of two characters to not be
1284 recognized when a longer sequence identical in the first two characters
1287 h. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to be attempted on $'...'
1288 single-quoted strings.
1290 i. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect redisplay when the prompt contained
1291 multibyte characters in an `invisible' sequence bracketed by \[ and
1294 j. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to short-circuit after
1295 encountering a multibyte character.
1297 3. New Features in Bash
1299 a. Here-documents within $(...) command substitutions may once more be
1300 delimited by the closing right paren, instead of requiring a newline.
1302 b. Bash's file status checks (executable, readable, etc.) now take file
1303 system ACLs into account on file systems that support them.
1305 c. Bash now passes environment variables with names that are not valid
1306 shell variable names through into the environment passed to child
1309 d. The `execute-unix-command' readline function now attempts to clear and
1310 reuse the current line rather than move to a new one after the command
1313 e. `printf -v' can now assign values to array indices.
1315 f. New `complete -E' and `compopt -E' options that work on the "empty"
1316 completion: completion attempted on an empty command line.
1318 g. New complete/compgen/compopt -D option to define a `default' completion:
1319 a completion to be invoked on command for which no completion has been
1320 defined. If this function returns 124, programmable completion is
1321 attempted again, allowing a user to dynamically build a set of completions
1322 as completion is attempted by having the default completion function
1323 install individual completion functions each time it is invoked.
1325 h. When displaying associative arrays, subscripts are now quoted.
1327 i. Changes to dabbrev-expand to make it more `emacs-like': no space appended
1328 after matches, completions are not sorted, and most recent history entries
1329 are presented first.
1331 j. The [[ and (( commands are now subject to the setting of `set -e' and the
1334 k. The source/. builtin now removes NUL bytes from the file before attempting
1337 l. There is a new configuration option (in config-top.h) that forces bash to
1338 forward all history entries to syslog.
1340 m. A new variable $BASHOPTS to export shell options settable using `shopt' to
1343 n. There is a new confgure option that forces the extglob option to be
1346 o. New variable $BASH_XTRACEFD; when set to an integer bash will write xtrace
1347 output to that file descriptor.
1349 p. If the optional left-hand-side of a redirection is of the form {var}, the
1350 shell assigns the file descriptor used to $var or uses $var as the file
1351 descriptor to move or close, depending on the redirection operator.
1353 q. The < and > operators to the [[ conditional command now do string
1354 comparison according to the current locale.
1356 r. Programmable completion now uses the completion for `b' instead of `a'
1357 when completion is attempted on a line like: a $(b c.
1359 s. Force extglob on temporarily when parsing the pattern argument to
1360 the == and != operators to the [[ command, for compatibility.
1362 t. Changed the behavior of interrupting the wait builtin when a SIGCHLD is
1363 received and a trap on SIGCHLD is set to be Posix-mode only.
1365 u. The read builtin has a new `-N nchars' option, which reads exactly NCHARS
1366 characters, ignoring delimiters like newline.
1368 4. New Features in Readline
1370 a. New bindable function: menu-complete-backward.
1372 b. In the vi insertion keymap, C-n is now bound to menu-complete by default,
1373 and C-p to menu-complete-backward.
1375 c. When in vi command mode, repeatedly hitting ESC now does nothing, even
1376 when ESC introduces a bound key sequence. This is closer to how
1377 historical vi behaves.
1379 d. New bindable function: skip-csi-sequence. Can be used as a default to
1380 consume key sequences generated by keys like Home and End without having
1383 e. New application-settable function: rl_filename_rewrite_hook. Can be used
1384 to rewite or modify filenames read from the file system before they are
1385 compared to the word to be completed.
1387 f. New bindable variable: skip-completed-text, active when completing in the
1388 middle of a word. If enabled, it means that characters in the completion
1389 that match characters in the remainder of the word are "skipped" rather
1390 than inserted into the line.
1392 g. The pre-readline-6.0 version of menu completion is available as
1393 "old-menu-complete" for users who do not like the readline-6.0 version.
1395 h. New bindable variable: echo-control-characters. If enabled, and the
1396 tty ECHOCTL bit is set, controls the echoing of characters corresponding
1397 to keyboard-generated signals.
1399 i. New bindable variable: enable-meta-key. Controls whether or not readline
1400 sends the smm/rmm sequences if the terminal indicates it has a meta key
1401 that enables eight-bit characters.
1403 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1404 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-release,
1405 and the previous version, bash-4.0-rc1.
1409 a. Changed the message printed when setlocale(3) fails to only include the
1410 strerror error text if the call changes errno.
1412 b. Changed trap command execution to reset the line number before running a
1413 trap (except DEBUG and RETURN traps).
1415 c. Fixed behavior of case-modifiying word expansions to not work on
1416 individual words within a variable's value.
1418 d. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not be interruptible when run in an
1421 e. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not run callbacks for the first line
1424 f. Fixed a bug that caused mapfile to not honor EOF typed in an interactive
1427 g. Fixed the coprocess reaping code to not run straight from a signal handler.
1429 h. Fixed a bug that caused printf -b to ignore the first % conversion specifier
1430 in the format string on 64-bit systems.
1432 i. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect word splitting when `:', `=', or `~'
1435 j. Fixed a bug that caused data corruption in the programmable completion code
1436 when a shell function called from a completion aborted execution.
1438 k. Fixed a bug that caused the CPU usage reported by the `time' builtin to be
1441 l. Changed behavior of shell when -e option is in effect to reflect consensus
1442 of Posix shell standardization working group.
1444 m. Fixed a bug introduced in bash-4.0-alpha that caused redirections to not
1445 be displayed by `type' or `declare' when appearing in functions under
1446 certain circumstances.
1448 2. Changes to Readline
1450 a. Fixed a bug that caused !(...) extended glob patterns to inhibit later
1453 b. Reworked the signal handling to avoid calling disallowed functions from a
1456 3. New Features in Bash
1458 a. `readarray' is now a synonym for `mapfile'.
1459 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1460 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-rc1,
1461 and the previous version, bash-4.0-beta2.
1465 a. Fixed a bug that caused parsing errors when a $()-style command
1466 substitution was follwed immediately by a quoted newline.
1468 b. Fixed a bug that caused extended shell globbing patterns beginning with
1469 `*(' to not work when used with pattern substitution word expansions.
1471 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1472 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-beta2,
1473 and the previous version, bash-4.0-beta.
1477 a. Fixed a bug that caused failed word expansions to set $? but not
1480 b. Changed filename completion to quote the tilde in a filename with a
1481 leading tilde that exists in the current directory.
1483 c. Fixed a bug that caused a file descriptor leak when performing
1484 redirections attached to a compound command.
1486 d. Fixed a bug that caused expansions of $@ and $* to not exit the shell if
1487 the -u option was enabled and there were no posititional parameters.
1489 e. Fixed a bug that resulted in bash not terminating immediately if a
1490 terminating signal was received while performing output.
1492 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash after creating 256 process
1493 substitutions during word completion.
1495 2. Changes to Readline
1497 a. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
1498 characters and numeric arguments to a command in a multibyte locale.
1500 b. Fixed a bug that caused redisplay errors when using prompts with invisible
1501 characters spanning more than two physical screen lines.
1503 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1504 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-beta,
1505 and the previous version, bash-4.0-alpha.
1509 a. Fixed a typo that caused a variable to be used before initialization
1510 while parsing Posix-style command substitutions.
1512 b. Fixed a bug that caused stray ^? when the expansion of a parameter used
1513 as part of a pattern removal expansion is empty, but part of a non-
1516 c. Fixed a bug that could cause strings not converted to numbers by strtol
1517 to be treated as if the conversion had been successful.
1519 d. The `return' builtin now accepts no options and requires a `--' before
1520 a negative return value, as Posix requires.
1522 e. Fixed a bug that caused local variables to be created with the empty
1523 string for a value rather than no value.
1525 f. Changed behavior so the shell now acts as if it received an interrupt
1526 when a pipeline is killed by SIGINT while executing a list.
1528 g. Fixed a bug that caused `declare var' and `typeset var' to initialize
1529 `var' to the empty string.
1531 h. Changed `bind' builtin to print a warning but proceed if invoked when
1532 line editing is not active.
1534 i. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to exit when the `errexit' option is
1535 set and a command in a pipeline returns a non-zero exit status.
1537 j. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not run the exit trap in a command
1538 run with `bash -c' under some circumstances.
1540 k. Fixed a bug that caused parser errors to occasionally not set $? when
1541 running commands with `eval'.
1543 l. Fixed a bug that caused stray control characters when evaluating compound
1544 array assignments containing $'\x7f' escapes.
1546 m. Fixed a bug that caused redirections involving file descriptor 10 as the
1547 target to behave incorrectly.
1549 n. Fixed a bug that could cause memory to be freed multiple times when
1550 assigning to COMP_WORDBREAKS.
1552 o. Fixed a bug that could cause NULL pointer dereferences when COMP_WORDBREAKS
1555 2. Changes to Readline
1557 3. New Features in Bash
1559 a. A value of 0 for the -t option to `read' now returns success if there is
1560 input available to be read from the specified file descriptor.
1562 b. CDPATH and GLOBIGNORE are ignored when the shell is running in privileged
1565 c. New bindable readline functions shell-forward-word and shell-backward-word,
1566 which move forward and backward words delimited by shell metacharacters
1567 and honor shell quoting.
1569 d. New bindable readline functions shell-backward-kill-word and shell-kill-word
1570 which kill words backward and forward, but use the same word boundaries
1571 as shell-forward-word and shell-backward-word.
1573 4. New Features in Readline
1575 a. If the kernel supports it, readline displays special characters
1576 corresponding to a keyboard-generated signal when the signal is received.
1578 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1579 This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.0-alpha,
1580 and the previous version, bash-3.2-release.
1584 a. Fixed several bugs in old-style `` command substitution parsing, including
1585 comment parsing and quoted string handling.
1587 b. Fixed problems parsing arguments to the [[ command's =~ regular expression
1588 matching operator: metacharacter and whitespace parsing.
1590 c. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to inappropriately reuse high-numbered
1591 file descriptors it used internally.
1593 d. Fixed a bug in pattern replacement word expansions that caused a `/' as
1594 the first character of an expanded pattern to be mistaken for a global
1595 replacement specifier.
1597 e. Fixed several problems with the asprintf and snprintf replacement functions
1598 that caused hangs and crashes.
1600 f. Fixed a bug in the calculation of the current and previous job that caused
1601 it to refer to incorrect jobs.
1603 g. Fixed a bug in the check for the validity of a hashed command pathname that
1604 caused unnecessary hash table deletions and additions.
1606 h. Fixed a bug that caused child processes to inherit the wrong value for $!.
1608 i. Fixed a bug that caused `.' to fail to read and execute commands from non-
1609 regular files such as devices or named pipes.
1611 j. Fixed a bug in printf formatting for the %x and %X expansions that occurred
1614 k. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash when creating temporary files if
1615 $TMPDIR named a non-writable directory.
1617 l. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to ignore $TMPDIR when creating temporary
1618 files under some circumstances.
1620 m. Fixed a bug that caused named pipes created by process substitution to not
1623 n. Fixed a bug that caused HISTTIMEFORMAT to not be honored when it appeared
1624 in the initial shell environment.
1626 o. Fixed several bugs in the expansion of $* and $@ (quoted and unquoted)
1627 when IFS is null or contains non-whitespace characters; the same changes
1628 apply to arrays subscripted with * or @.
1630 p. Fixed several problems with pattern substitution expansions on the
1631 positional parameters and arrays subscripted with * or @ that occurred
1632 when $IFS was set to the empty string.
1634 q. Made a change to the default locale initialization code that should
1635 result in better behavior from the locale-aware library functions.
1637 r. Fixed a bug that caused compacting the jobs list to drop jobs.
1639 s. Fixed a bug that caused jumps back to the top-level processing loop from
1640 a builtin command to leave the shell in an inconsistent state.
1642 t. Fixed a bug that caused characters that would be escaped internally to be
1643 doubled when escaped with a backslash.
1645 u. Fixed the initialization of mailboxes to not cause maildirs to be read
1646 (and stat(2) called for every message file) at shell startup.
1648 v. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not display $PS2 when the read builtin
1649 reads a line continued with a backslash.
1651 w. Fixed a bug that caused errors in word splitting when $IFS contained
1652 characters used for internal quoting.
1654 x. Fixed bugs that caused problems with output from shell builtins not being
1655 completely displayed on some systems.
1657 y. Fixed a bug that caused output to be lost when a redirection is acting on
1658 the shell's output file descriptor.
1660 z. Fixed bugs caused by shell builtins not checking for all write errors.
1662 aa. Fixed a problem that caused the shell to dump core if expansions on the
1663 pattern passed to the pattern removal word expansions resulted in expansion
1666 bb. Fixed a bug that caused bash to loop infinitely after creating and
1667 waiting for 4096 jobs.
1669 cc. Fixed a bug that caused bash to lose the status of a background job under
1670 certain circumstances.
1672 dd. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not look in the temporary environment
1673 when performing variable lookup under certain circumstances.
1675 ee. Fixed a bug that caused bash to close file descriptors greater than 10
1676 when they were used in redirections.
1678 ff. Fixed a problem that caused the shell to attempt to read from the standard
1679 input when called as `bash -i script'.
1681 gg. Fixed a memory leak and variable initialization problems when the -v option
1682 was supplied to `printf' that could cause incorrect results.
1684 hh. Fixed a bug that caused the `read' builtin to count bytes when the -n option
1685 was supplied, rather than (possibly multibyte) characters.
1687 ii. Fixed a bug when displaying a function due to not converting the function
1688 to an external form.
1690 jj. Changed job control initialization to ensure that the shell has a tty
1691 as its controlling terminal before enabling job control.
1693 kk. Fixed a bug with the `test' builtin that caused it to misinterpret
1694 arguments beginning with `-' but containing more than one character.
1696 ll. Fixed bug that could cause the shell to dump core in certain cases where
1697 a command sets the SIGINT disposition to the default.
1699 mm. Fixed a bug in the pattern replacement (affecting both word expansion
1700 and the `fc' builtin) that occurred when the pattern and replacement
1703 nn. Fixed a bug that caused an arithmetic evaluation error to disable all
1706 oo. Fixed a bug in pathname expansion that caused it to interpret backslashes
1707 in the pathname as quoting characters.
1709 pp. Fixed a bug in the replacement getcwd() implementation that could cause
1710 memory to be overwritten.
1712 qq. When in Posix mode, the `ulimit' builtin now uses a block size of 512 for
1713 the `-c' and `-f' options.
1715 rr. Brace expansion now allows process substitutions to pass through unchanged.
1717 ss. Fixed a problem in the command name completion code to avoid quoting
1718 escaped special characters twice when the command name begins with a tilde.
1720 tt. Fixed a problem in the printf builtin that resulted in single-byte
1721 output for the "'" escape, even when using multibyte characters.
1723 uu. Fixed a bug that caused the failure exit status to be lost when redirections
1724 attached to a compound command failed.
1726 vv. Fixed a bug that caused the internal random number generator to not be
1727 re-seeded correctly when creating a subshell.
1729 ww. Fixed a bug that could cause the bash replacement getcwd to overwrite
1732 xx. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not receive SIGINT if it was sent
1733 while the shell was waiting for a command substitution to terminate, and
1734 make sure the exit status is correct when it does.
1736 yy. Fixed a bug that resulted in the second and subsequent children spawned
1737 by a shell begun to run a command substitution being placed into the
1738 wrong process group.
1740 zz. Fixed a bug that caused the results of successful tilde expansion to be
1741 subject to pathname expansion and word splitting.
1743 aaa. Fixed a bug that could cause the shell to hang if it encountered an
1744 error that caused it to jump back to the top processing loop during a
1745 command substitution or `eval' command.
1747 bbb. Fixed a bug that caused the `read' builtin to use the tty's attributes
1748 instead of those of the file descriptor passed with the -u option when
1749 processing the -n and -d options.
1751 ccc. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect expansion of ${array[@]:foo} if the
1752 first character of $IFS was not whitespace.
1754 ddd. Fixed a bug that occurred when scanning for the ending delimiter of a
1755 ${parameter/pat/sub} expansion.
1757 eee. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to inappropriately expand command
1758 substitutions in words when expanding directory names for completion.
1760 fff. Fixed a bug that caused the `fc' builtin to look too far back in the
1761 history list under certain circumstances.
1763 ggg. Fixed a bug that caused a shell running in Posix mode to search $PWD for
1764 a file specified as an argument to source/. when the file was not found
1767 hhh. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to modify the case of a command word
1768 found via command completion when the shell was performing case-
1769 insensitive completion.
1771 iii. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to search $PATH for an argument to
1772 source/. even when it contained a `/'.
1774 jjj. Fixed a bug that caused brace expansion to misorder expansions when the
1775 locale did not have a collating order like aAbBcC...zZ.
1777 kkk. Fixed a bug that did not allow `set +o history' to have any effect when
1778 run in a startup file or from a sourced file.
1780 lll. Fixed a bug with the precedence of the ?: conditional arithmetic operator.
1782 mmm. Fixed a bug that caused side effects of temporary variable assignments
1783 to persist in the shell environment.
1785 nnn. Fixed a bug that caused the terminal to be left in non-canonical mode
1786 when using editing commands that invoke the an editor on the current
1789 ooo. Fixed a bug that caused globbing characters and characters in $IFS to not
1790 be quoted appropriately when displaying assignment statements.
1792 ppp. Fixed a bug that caused the `-e' option to be inherited when sourcing a
1793 file or evaluating a command with `eval' even if the return value of the
1794 command was supposed to be ignored.
1796 qqq. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to attempt to created variables with
1797 invalid names if such names appeared in the initial environment.
1799 rrr. Fixed a bug with quote removal in strings where the final character is a
1802 sss. Fixed a bug that caused the effects of special variables to persist even
1803 when the variables were unset as part of the shell reinitializing itself
1804 to execute a shell script.
1806 ttt. Fixed a bug that caused the history to not be saved after `history -c' or
1807 `history -d' was executed until a sufficient number of commands had been
1808 saved to the history.
1810 uuu. Bash now parses command substitutions according to Posix rules: parsing
1811 the command contained in $() to find the closing delimiter.
1813 vvv. Fixed a bug that caused traps on SIGCHLD set in a SIGCHLD handler to
1816 www. Fixed a bug that didn't allow SIGCHLD to interrupt the `wait' builtin
1819 xxx. Invalid numeric arguments to shell builtins no longer cause the shell to
1820 short-circuit any executing compound command.
1822 yyy. Fixed a bug that caused the exit status to be lost when `break' was
1823 used to short-circuit a loop's execution.
1825 zzz. Fixed a bug that caused stray ^? characters to be left in expansions of
1828 aaaa. Bash now prints better error messages for here documents terminated by
1829 EOF and for identifying the incorrect token in an invalid arithmetic
1832 bbbb. Fixed a bug in the variable length word expansion that caused it to
1833 incorrectly calculate the number of multibyte characters.
1835 cccc. Fixed a race condition that could result in the top-level shell setting
1836 the terminal's process group to an incorrect value if the process
1837 group was changed by a child of a child of the shell.
1839 dddd. Fixed a bug that caused here documents belonging to commands within a
1840 compound command to be displayed in a syntactially-incorrect form, which
1841 prevented them from being re-read as input.
1843 eeee. The shell displays more warnings about failures to set the locale.
1845 ffff. Fixed a bug that caused the body of a here-document to not be saved to
1848 gggg. Fixed a bug that caused configure to incorrectly conclude that FreeBSD
1849 had /dev/fd available, resulting in problems with process substitution.
1851 2. Changes to Readline
1853 a. Fixed a number of redisplay errors in environments supporting multibyte
1856 b. Fixed bugs in vi command mode that caused motion commands to inappropriately
1859 c. When using the arrow keys in vi insertion mode, readline allows movement
1860 beyond the current end of the line (unlike command mode).
1862 d. Fixed bugs that caused readline to loop when the terminal has been taken
1863 away and reads return -1/EIO.
1865 e. Fixed bugs in redisplay occurring when displaying prompts containing
1866 invisible characters.
1868 f. Fixed a bug that caused the completion append character to not be reset to
1869 the default after an application-specified completion function changed it.
1871 g. Fixed a problem that caused incorrect positioning of the cursor while in
1872 emacs editing mode when moving forward at the end of a line while using
1873 a locale supporting multibyte characters.
1875 h. Fixed an off-by-one error that caused readline to drop every 511th
1876 character of buffered input.
1878 i. Fixed a bug that resulted in SIGTERM not being caught or cleaned up.
1880 j. Fixed redisplay bugs caused by multiline prompts with invisible characters
1881 or no characters following the final newline.
1883 k. Fixed redisplay bug caused by prompts consisting solely of invisible
1886 l. Fixed a bug in the code that buffers characters received very quickly in
1887 succession which caused characters to be dropped.
1889 m. Fixed a bug that caused readline to reference uninitialized data structures
1890 if it received a SIGWINCH before completing initialzation.
1892 n. Fixed a bug that caused the vi-mode `last command' to be set incorrectly
1893 and therefore unrepeatable.
1895 o. Fixed a bug that caused readline to disable echoing when it was being used
1896 with an output file descriptor that was not a terminal.
1898 p. Readline now blocks SIGINT while manipulating internal data structures
1901 q. Fixed a bug in redisplay that caused readline to segfault when pasting a
1902 very long line (over 130,000 characters).
1904 r. Fixed bugs in redisplay when using prompts with no visible printing
1907 3. New Features in Bash
1909 a. When using substring expansion on the positional parameters, a starting
1910 index of 0 now causes $0 to be prefixed to the list.
1912 b. The `help' builtin now prints its columns with entries sorted vertically
1913 rather than horizontally.
1915 c. There is a new variable, $BASHPID, which always returns the process id of
1918 d. There is a new `autocd' option that, when enabled, causes bash to attempt
1919 to `cd' to a directory name that is supplied as the first word of a
1922 e. There is a new `checkjobs' option that causes the shell to check for and
1923 report any running or stopped jobs at exit.
1925 f. The programmable completion code exports a new COMP_TYPE variable, set to
1926 a character describing the type of completion being attempted.
1928 g. The programmable completion code exports a new COMP_KEY variable, set to
1929 the character that caused the completion to be invoked (e.g., TAB).
1931 h. If creation of a child process fails due to insufficient resources, bash
1932 will try again several times before reporting failure.
1934 i. The programmable completion code now uses the same set of characters as
1935 readline when breaking the command line into a list of words.
1937 j. The block multiplier for the ulimit -c and -f options is now 512 when in
1938 Posix mode, as Posix specifies.
1940 k. Changed the behavior of the read builtin to save any partial input received
1941 in the specified variable when the read builtin times out. This also
1942 results in variables specified as arguments to read to be set to the empty
1943 string when there is no input available. When the read builtin times out,
1944 it returns an exit status greater than 128.
1946 l. The shell now has the notion of a `compatibility level', controlled by
1947 new variables settable by `shopt'. Setting this variable currently
1948 restores the bash-3.1 behavior when processing quoted strings on the rhs
1949 of the `=~' operator to the `[[' command.
1951 m. The `ulimit' builtin now has new -b (socket buffer size) and -T (number
1952 of threads) options.
1954 n. The -p option to `declare' now displays all variable values and attributes
1955 (or function values and attributes if used with -f).
1957 o. There is a new `compopt' builtin that allows completion functions to modify
1958 completion options for existing completions or the completion currently
1961 p. The `read' builtin has a new -i option which inserts text into the reply
1962 buffer when using readline.
1964 q. A new `-E' option to the complete builtin allows control of the default
1965 behavior for completion on an empty line.
1967 r. There is now limited support for completing command name words containing
1968 globbing characters.
1970 s. Changed format of internal help documentation for all builtins to roughly
1971 follow man page format.
1973 t. The `help' builtin now has a new -d option, to display a short description,
1974 and a -m option, to print help information in a man page-like format.
1976 u. There is a new `mapfile' builtin to populate an array with lines from a
1979 v. If a command is not found, the shell attempts to execute a shell function
1980 named `command_not_found_handle', supplying the command words as the
1983 w. There is a new shell option: `globstar'. When enabled, the globbing code
1984 treats `**' specially -- it matches all directories (and files within
1985 them, when appropriate) recursively.
1987 x. There is a new shell option: `dirspell'. When enabled, the filename
1988 completion code performs spelling correction on directory names during
1991 y. The `-t' option to the `read' builtin now supports fractional timeout
1994 z. Brace expansion now allows zero-padding of expanded numeric values and
1995 will add the proper number of zeroes to make sure all values contain the
1996 same number of digits.
1998 aa. There is a new bash-specific bindable readline function: `dabbrev-expand'.
1999 It uses menu completion on a set of words taken from the history list.
2001 bb. The command assigned to a key sequence with `bind -x' now sets two new
2002 variables in the environment of the executed command: READLINE_LINE_BUFFER
2003 and READLINE_POINT. The command can change the current readline line
2004 and cursor position by modifying READLINE_LINE_BUFFER and READLINE_POINT,
2007 cc. There is a new &>> redirection operator, which appends the standard output
2008 and standard error to the named file.
2010 dd. The parser now understands `|&' as a synonym for `2>&1 |', which redirects
2011 the standard error for a command through a pipe.
2013 ee. The new `;&' case statement action list terminator causes execution to
2014 continue with the action associated with the next pattern in the
2015 statement rather than terminating the command.
2017 ff. The new `;;&' case statement action list terminator causes the shell to
2018 test the next set of patterns after completing execution of the current
2019 action, rather than terminating the command.
2021 gg. The shell understands a new variable: PROMPT_DIRTRIM. When set to an
2022 integer value greater than zero, prompt expansion of \w and \W will
2023 retain only that number of trailing pathname components and replace
2024 the intervening characters with `...'.
2026 hh. There are new case-modifying word expansions: uppercase (^[^]) and
2027 lowercase (,[,]). They can work on either the first character or
2028 array element, or globally. They accept an optional shell pattern
2029 that determines which characters to modify. There is an optionally-
2030 configured feature to include capitalization operators.
2032 ii. The shell provides associative array variables, with the appropriate
2033 support to create, delete, assign values to, and expand them.
2035 jj. The `declare' builtin now has new -l (convert value to lowercase upon
2036 assignment) and -u (convert value to uppercase upon assignment) options.
2037 There is an optionally-configurable -c option to capitalize a value at
2040 kk. There is a new `coproc' reserved word that specifies a coprocess: an
2041 asynchronous command run with two pipes connected to the creating shell.
2042 Coprocs can be named. The input and output file descriptors and the
2043 PID of the coprocess are available to the calling shell in variables
2044 with coproc-specific names.
2046 4. New Features in Readline
2048 a. A new variable, rl_sort_completion_matches; allows applications to inhibit
2049 match list sorting (but beware: some things don't work right if
2050 applications do this).
2052 b. A new variable, rl_completion_invoking_key; allows applications to discover
2053 the key that invoked rl_complete or rl_menu_complete.
2055 c. The functions rl_block_sigint and rl_release_sigint are now public and
2056 available to calling applications who want to protect critical sections
2059 d. The functions rl_save_state and rl_restore_state are now public and
2060 available to calling applications; documented rest of readline's state
2063 e. A new user-settable variable, `history-size', allows setting the maximum
2064 number of entries in the history list.
2066 f. There is a new implementation of menu completion, with several improvements
2067 over the old; the most notable improvement is a better `completions
2070 g. The menu completion code now uses the rl_menu_completion_entry_function
2071 variable, allowing applications to provide their own menu completion
2074 h. There is support for replacing a prefix of a pathname with a `...' when
2075 displaying possible completions. This is controllable by setting the
2076 `completion-prefix-display-length' variable. Matches with a common prefix
2077 longer than this value have the common prefix replaced with `...'.
2079 i. There is a new `revert-all-at-newline' variable. If enabled, readline will
2080 undo all outstanding changes to all history lines when `accept-line' is
2083 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2084 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-release,
2085 and the previous version, bash-3.2-beta.
2089 a. Fixed a bug that caused the temporary environment passed to a command to
2090 affect the shell's environment under certain circumstances.
2092 b. Fixed a bug in the printf builtin that caused the %q format specifier to
2093 ignore empty string arguments.
2095 c. Improved multibyte character environment detection at configuration time.
2097 d. Fixed a bug in the read builtin that left spurious escape characters in the
2098 input after processing backslashes when assigning to an array variable.
2100 2. Changes to Readline
2102 a. Fixed a redisplay bug that occurred in multibyte-capable locales when the
2103 prompt was one character longer than the screen width.
2104 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2105 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-beta,
2106 and the previous version, bash-3.2-alpha.
2110 a. Changed the lexical analyzer to treat locale-specific blank characters as
2113 b. Fixed a bug in command printing to avoid confusion between redirections and
2114 process substitution.
2116 c. Fixed problems with cross-compiling originating from inherited environment
2119 d. Added write error reporting to printf builtin.
2121 e. Fixed a bug in the variable expansion code that could cause a core dump in
2122 a multi-byte locale.
2124 f. Fixed a bug that caused substring expansion of a null string to return
2127 g. BASH_COMMAND now retains its previous value while executing commands as the
2128 result of a trap, as the documentation states.
2130 2. Changes to Readline
2132 a. Fixed a bug with prompt redisplay in a multi-byte locale to avoid redrawing
2133 the prompt and input line multiple times.
2135 b. Fixed history expansion to not be confused by here-string redirection.
2137 c. Readline no longer treats read errors by converting them to newlines, as
2138 it does with EOF. This caused partial lines to be returned from readline().
2140 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2141 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.2-alpha,
2142 and the previous version, bash-3.1-release.
2146 a. Fixed a source bug that caused the minimal configuration to not compile.
2148 b. Fixed memory leaks in error handling for the `read' builtin.
2150 c. Changed the [[ and (( compound commands to set PIPESTATUS with their exit
2153 d. Fixed some parsing problems with compound array assignments.
2155 e. Added additional configuration changes for: NetBSD (incomplete multibyte
2158 f. Fixed two bugs with local array variable creation when shadowing a variable
2159 of the same name from a previous context.
2161 g. Fixed the `read' builtin to restore the correct set of completion functions
2162 if a timeout occurs.
2164 h. Added code to defer the initialization of HISTSIZE (and its stifling of the
2165 history list) until the history file is loaded, allowing a startup file to
2166 override the default value.
2168 i. Tightened up the arithmetic expression parsing to produce better error
2169 messages when presented with invalid operators.
2171 j. Fixed the cross-compilation support to build the signal list at shell
2172 invocation rather than compile time if cross-compiling.
2174 k. Fixed multibyte support for non-gcc compilers (or compilers that do not
2175 allow automatic array variable sizing based on a non-constant value).
2177 l. Several fixes to the code that manages the list of terminated jobs and
2178 their exit statuses, and the list of active and recently-terminated jobs
2179 to avoid pid aliasing/wraparound and allocation errors.
2181 m. Fixed a problem that allowed scripts to die due to SIGINT while waiting
2182 for children, even when started in the background or otherwise ignoring
2185 n. Fixed a bug that caused shells invoked as -/bin/bash from not being
2186 recognized as login shells.
2188 o. Fixed a problem that caused shells in the background to give the terminal
2189 to a process group other than the foreground shell process group.
2191 p. Fixed a problem with extracting the `varname' in ${#varname}.
2193 q. Fixed the code that handles SIGQUIT to not exit immediately -- thereby
2194 calling functions that may not be called in a signal handler context --
2195 but set a flag and exit afterward (like SIGINT).
2197 r. Changed the brace expansion code to skip over braces that don't begin a
2198 valid matched brace expansion construct.
2200 s. Fixed `typeset' and `declare' to not require that their shell function
2201 operands to be valid shell identifiers.
2203 t. Changed `test' to use access(2) with a temporary uid/euid swap when testing
2204 file attributes and running setuid, and access(2) in most other cases.
2206 u. Changed completion code to not attempt command name completion on a line
2207 consisting solely of whitespace when no_empty_command_completion is set.
2209 v. The `hash' builtin now prints nothing in posix mode when the hash table is
2210 empty, and prints a message to that effect to stdout instead of stderr
2211 when not in posix mode.
2213 w. Fixed a bug in the extended pattern matching code that caused it to fail to
2214 match periods with certain patterns.
2216 x. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing filename
2217 generation in directories with thousands of files.
2219 y. Returned to the original Bourne shell rules for parsing ``: no recursive
2220 parsing of embedded quoted strings or ${...} constructs.
2222 z. The inheritence of the DEBUG, RETURN, and ERR traps is now dependent only
2223 on the settings of the `functrace' and `errtrace' shell options, rather
2224 than whether or not the shell is in debugging mode.
2226 aa. Fixed a problem with $HOME being converted to ~ in the expansion of
2227 members of the DIRSTACK array.
2229 bb. Fixed a problem with quoted arguments to arithmetic expansions in certain
2232 cc. The command word completion code now no longer returns matching directories
2233 while searching $PATH.
2235 dd. Fixed a bug with zero-padding and precision handling in snprintf()
2238 ee. Fixed a bug that caused the command substitution code not to take embedded
2239 shell comments into account.
2241 ff. Fixed a bug that caused $((...);(...)) to be misinterpreted as an
2242 arithmetic substitution.
2244 gg. Fixed a bug in the prompt expansion code that inappropriately added a
2245 \001 before a \002 under certain circumstances.
2247 hh. Fixed a bug that caused `unset LANG' to not properly reset the locale
2248 (previous versions would set the locale back to what it was when bash
2249 was started rather than the system's "native" locale).
2251 ii. Fixed a bug that could cause file descriptors > 10 to not be closed even
2252 when closed explicitly by a script.
2254 jj. Fixed a bug that caused single quotes to be stripped from ANSI-C quoting
2255 inside double-quoted command substitutions.
2257 kk. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when `return' was executed as the
2258 last element of a pipeline inside a shell function.
2260 ll. Fixed a bug that caused DEBUG trap strings to overwrite commands stored in
2263 2. Changes to Readline
2265 a. Fixed a problem that caused segmentation faults when using readline in
2266 callback mode and typing consecutive DEL characters on an empty line.
2268 b. Fixed several redisplay problems with multibyte characters, all having to
2269 do with the different code paths and variable meanings between single-byte
2270 and multibyte character redisplay.
2272 c. Fixed a problem with key sequence translation when presented with the
2275 d. Fixed a problem that prevented the `a' command in vi mode from being
2276 undone and redone properly.
2278 e. Fixed a problem that prevented empty inserts in vi mode from being undone
2281 f. Fixed a problem that caused readline to initialize with an incorrect idea
2282 of whether or not the terminal can autowrap.
2284 g. Fixed output of key bindings (like bash `bind -p') to honor the setting of
2285 convert-meta and use \e where appropriate.
2287 h. Changed the default filename completion function to call the filename
2288 dequoting function if the directory completion hook isn't set. This means
2289 that any directory completion hooks need to dequote the directory name,
2290 since application-specific hooks need to know how the word was quoted,
2291 even if no other changes are made.
2293 i. Fixed a bug with creating the prompt for a non-interactive search string
2294 when there are non-printing characters in the primary prompt.
2296 j. Fixed a bug that caused prompts with invisible characters to be redrawn
2297 multiple times in a multibyte locale.
2299 k. Fixed a bug that could cause the key sequence scanning code to return the
2302 l. Fixed a problem with the callback interface that caused it to fail when
2303 using multi-character keyboard macros.
2305 m. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when an edited history entry was
2306 re-executed under certain conditions.
2308 n. Fixed a bug that caused readline to reference freed memory when attmpting
2309 to display a portion of the prompt.
2311 3. New Features in Bash
2313 a. Changed the parameter pattern replacement functions to not anchor the
2314 pattern at the beginning of the string if doing global replacement - that
2315 combination doesn't make any sense.
2317 b. When running in `word expansion only' mode (--wordexp option), inhibit
2318 process substitution.
2320 c. Loadable builtins now work on MacOS X 10.[34].
2322 d. Shells running in posix mode no longer set $HOME, as POSIX requires.
2324 e. The code that checks for binary files being executed as shell scripts now
2325 checks only for NUL rather than any non-printing character.
2327 f. Quoting the string argument to the [[ command's =~ operator now forces
2328 string matching, as with the other pattern-matching operators.
2330 4. New Features in Readline
2332 a. Calling applications can now set the keyboard timeout to 0, allowing
2335 b. The value of SYS_INPUTRC (configurable at compilation time) is now used as
2336 the default last-ditch startup file.
2338 c. The history file reading functions now allow windows-like \r\n line
2341 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2342 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-release,
2343 and the previous version, bash-3.1-rc2.
2345 1. Changes to Readline
2347 a. Several changes to the multibyte redisplay code to fix problems with
2348 prompts containing invisible characters.
2350 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2351 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-rc2,
2352 and the previous version, bash-3.1-rc1.
2356 a. Fixed a bug that caused a DEBUG trap to overwrite a command string that's
2357 eventually attached to a background job.
2359 b. Changed some code so that filenames with leading tildes with spaces in the
2360 name aren't tilde-expanded by the bash completion code.
2362 c. Fixed a bug that caused the pushd builtin to fail to change to
2363 directories with leading `-'.
2365 d. Fixed a small memory leak in the programmable completion code.
2367 2. Changes to Readline
2369 a. Fixed a redisplay bug caused by moving the cursor vertically to a line
2370 with invisible characters in the prompt in a multibyte locale.
2372 b. Fixed a bug that could cause the terminal special chars to be bound in the
2373 wrong keymap in vi mode.
2375 3. New Features in Bash
2377 a. If compiled for strict POSIX conformance, LINES and COLUMNS may now
2378 override the true terminal size.
2380 4. New Features in Readline
2382 a. A new external application-controllable variable that allows the LINES
2383 and COLUMNS environment variables to set the window size regardless of
2384 what the kernel returns.
2386 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2387 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-rc1,
2388 and the previous version, bash-3.1-beta1.
2392 a. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps due to accessing the current
2393 pipeline while in the middle of modifying it.
2395 b. Fixed a bug that caused pathnames with backslashes still quoting characters
2396 to be passed to opendir().
2398 c. Command word completion now obeys the setting of completion-ignore-case.
2400 d. Fixed a problem with redirection that caused file descriptors greater than
2401 2 to be inappropriately marked as close-on-exec.
2403 e. In Posix mode, after `wait' is called to wait for a particular process
2404 explicitly, that process is removed from the list of processes known to
2405 the shell, and subsequent attempts to wait for it return errors.
2407 f. Fixed a bug that caused extended pattern matching to incorrectly scan
2408 backslash-escaped pattern characters.
2410 g. Fixed a synchronization problem that could cause core dumps when handling
2413 h. Fixed a bug that caused an unmatched backquote to be accepted without an
2414 error when processing here documents.
2416 i. Fixed a small memory leak in the `cd' builtin.
2418 j. Fix for MacOS X so it gets the values for the HOSTTYPE, MACHTYPE, and
2419 OSTYPE variables at build time, to support universal binaries.
2421 k. Fixed a bug that could cause an exit trap to return the exit status of
2422 the trap command rather than the status as it was before the trap was
2423 run as the shell's exit status.
2425 2. New Features in Bash
2427 3. Changes to Readline
2429 a. Fixed a bug that caused reversing the incremental search direction to
2432 b. Fixed the vi-mode `U' command to only undo up to the first time insert mode
2433 was entered, as Posix specifies.
2435 c. Fixed a bug in the vi-mode `r' command that left the cursor in the wrong
2438 4. New Features in Readline
2440 a. New application-callable auxiliary function, rl_variable_value, returns
2441 a string corresponding to a readline variable's value.
2443 b. When parsing inputrc files and variable binding commands, the parser
2444 strips trailing whitespace from values assigned to boolean variables
2445 before checking them.
2448 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2449 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-beta1,
2450 and the previous version, bash-3.1-alpha1.
2454 a. Added some system-specific signal names.
2456 b. Fixed a typo in the ulimit builtin to make `x' the right option to
2457 maniuplate the limit on file locks.
2459 c. Fixed a problem with using += to append to index 0 of an array variable
2460 when not using subscript syntax.
2462 d. A few changes to configure.in to remove calls to obsolete or outdated
2465 e. Make sure changes to variables bash handles specially (e.g., LC_ALL) are
2466 made when the variable is set in the temporary environment to a command.
2468 f. Make sure changes to variables bash handles specially (e.g., LC_ALL) are
2469 made when the variable is modified using `printf -v'.
2471 g. The export environment is now remade on cygwin when HOME is changed, so
2472 DLLs bash is linked against pick up the new value. This fixes problems
2473 with tilde expansion when linking against and already-installed readline.
2475 h. Small fix to the logic for performing tilde expansion in posix mode, so
2476 expansion on the right-hand side of an assignment statement takes place.
2478 i. Fixed a bug that prevented redirections associated with a shell function
2479 from being executed when in a subshell.
2481 j. Fixed `source' and `.' builtins to not require an executable file when
2482 searching $PATH for a file to source.
2484 k. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect word splitting in a function when IFS
2485 was declared local, then unset.
2487 l. Fixed a problem with the `kill' builtin that prevented sending signals
2488 to a process group under certain circumstances when providing a pid < 0.
2490 m. When in POSIX mode, `pwd' now checks that the value it prints is the same
2491 directory as `.', even when displaying $PWD.
2493 n. Fixed a problem with the `read' builtin when reading a script from standard
2494 input and reading data from the same file.
2496 o. Fixed a problem with the `type' and `command' builtins that caused absolute
2497 pathnames to be displayed incorrectly.
2499 p. Some changes to the `bg' builtin for POSIX conformance.
2501 q. The `fc' builtin now removes the `fc' command that caused it to invoke an
2502 editor on specified history entries from the history entirely, rather than
2505 r. When in POSIX mode, the `v' command in vi editing mode simply invokes vi
2506 on the current command, rather than checking $FCEDIT and $EDITOR.
2508 s. Fixed a small memory leak in the pathname canonicalization code.
2510 t. Fixed a bug that caused the expanded value of a $'...' string to be
2511 incorrectly re-quoted if it occurred within a double-quoted ${...}
2512 parameter expansion.
2514 u. Restored default emacs-mode key binding of M-TAB to dynamic-complete-history.
2516 v. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when interrupting loops running builtins
2519 w. Make sure that some of the functions bash provides replacements for are
2522 x. The code that scans embedded commands for the parser (`...` and $(...)) is
2523 now more aware of embedded comments and their effect on quoted strings.
2525 y. Changed the `-n' option to the `history' builtin to not reset the number of
2526 history lines read in the current session after reading the new lines from
2527 the history file if the history is being appended when it is written to
2528 the file, since the appending takes care of the problem that the adjustment
2529 was intended to solve.
2531 z. Improved the error message displayed when a shell script fails to execute
2532 because the environment and size of command line arguments are too large.
2534 aa. A small fix to make sure that $HISTCMD is evaluated whenever the shell is
2535 saving commands to the history list, not just when HISTSIZE is defined.
2537 2. Changes to Readline
2539 a. The `change-case' command now correctly changes the case of multibyte
2542 b. Changes to the shared library construction scripts to deal with Windows
2543 DLL naming conventions for Cygwin.
2545 c. Fixed the redisplay code to avoid core dumps resulting from a poorly-timed
2548 d. Fixed the non-incremental search code in vi mode to dispose of any current
2549 undo list when copying a line from the history into the current editing
2552 e. The variable assignment code now ignores whitespace at the end of lines
2553 when assigning to boolean variables.
2555 f. The `C-w' binding in incremental search now understands multibyte
2558 3. New Features in Bash
2560 a. A new configuration option, `--enable-strict-posix-default', which will
2561 build bash to be POSIX conforming by default.
2563 4. New Features in Readline
2565 a. If the rl_completion_query_items is set to a value < 0, readline never
2566 asks the user whether or not to view the possible completions.
2568 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2569 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.1-alpha1,
2570 and the previous version, bash-3.0-release.
2574 a. Fixed a bug that caused bash to crash if referencing an unset local array.
2576 b. Fixed a problem that caused tilde expansion to not be performed before
2577 attempting globbing word completion.
2579 c. Fixed an incompatibility so that a first argument to trap that's a valid
2580 signal number will be trated as a signal rather than a command to execute.
2582 d. Fixed ${#word} expansion to correctly compute the length of a string
2583 containing multibyte characters.
2585 e. Fixed a bug that caused bash to not pass the correct flags for signal
2586 disposition to child processes.
2588 f. Fixed a bug that caused `fc -l' to list one too many history entries.
2590 g. Some fixes to `fc' for POSIX conformance.
2592 h. Some fixes to job status display for POSIX conformance.
2594 i. Fixed a bug that caused `command -v' to display output if a command was not
2595 found -- it should be silent.
2597 j. In POSIX mode, `type' and `command -[vV]' do not report non-executable
2598 files, even if the shell will attempt to execute them.
2600 k. Fixed a bug that caused the `==' operator to the [[ command to not attempt
2601 extended pattern matching.
2603 l. Fixed the brace expansion code to handle characters whose value exceeds 128.
2605 m. Fixed `printf' to handle strings with a leading `\0' whose length is
2608 n. Fixed a couple of problems with brace expansion where `${' was handled
2611 o. Fixed off-by-one error when calculating the upper bound of `offset' when
2612 processing the ${array[@]:offset:length} expansion.
2614 p. System-specific configuration changes for: FreeBSD 5.x, Interix, MacOS X
2615 10.4, Linux 2.4+ kernels, Linux 3.x kernels, Dragonfly BSD, QNX 6.x,
2618 q. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to ignore the status of the rightmost
2619 command in a pipeline when the `pipefail' option was enabled.
2621 r. Fixed a completion bug that caused core dumps when expanding a directory
2624 s. Fixed a bug that prevented `hash -d' from removing commands from the hash
2627 t. Fixed word splitting to avoid really bad quadratic performance when
2628 expanding long lists.
2630 u. Fixed a bug that caused negative offsets in substring expansion to use the
2633 v. Fixed a bug in printf that caused it to not return failure on write errors.
2635 w. Fixed a bug that caused commands in subshells to not be properly timed.
2637 x. The shell parser no longer attempts to parse a compound assignment specially
2638 unless in a position where an assignment statement is acceptable or parsing
2639 arguments to a builtin that accepts assignment statements.
2641 y. Fixed a problem that caused a `case' statement to be added to the history
2642 incorrectly as a single command if the `case word' was on one line and the
2645 z. Fixed a problem that caused internal shell quoting characters to be
2646 incorrectly quoted with backslashes under some circumstances.
2648 aa. The shell now performs correct word splitting when IFS contains multibyte
2651 bb. The mail checking code now resets the cached file information if the size
2652 drops to 0, even if the times don't change.
2654 cc. A completed command name that is found in $PATH as well as the name of a
2655 directory in the current directory no longer has a slash appended in certain
2656 circumstances: a single instance found in $PATH when `.' is not in $PATH,
2657 and multiple instances found in $PATH, even when `.' is in $PATH.
2659 dd. Incorporated tilde expansion into the word expansion code rather than as a
2660 separately-called function, fixing some cases where it was performed
2661 inappropriately (e.g., after the second `=' in an assignment statement or
2662 in a double-quoted parameter expansion).
2664 ee. Fixed several bugs encountered when parsing compound assignment statements,
2665 so that compound assignments appearing as arguments to builtins are no
2666 longer double-expanded.
2668 ff. Fixed a bug in the command execution code that caused asynchronous commands
2669 containing command substitutions to not put the terminal in the wrong
2672 gg. Bash now handles the case where the WCONTINUED flag causes waitpid() to
2673 return -1/EINVAL at runtime as well as configuration time.
2675 hh. Fixed parser to generate an error when the pipeline `argument' to `!' or
2678 ii. The shell now takes a little more care when manipulating file descriptors
2679 greater than 9 with the `exec' builtin.
2681 jj. Fixed a bug that caused variable assignments preceding the `command' builtin
2682 preceding a special builtin to be preserved after the command completed in
2685 kk. Fixed a bug that allowed variables beginning with a digit to be created.
2687 ll. Fixed a bug that caused a \<newline> to be removed when parsing a $'...'
2690 mm. A shell whose name begins with `-' will now be a restricted shell if the
2691 remainder of the name indicates it should be restricted.
2693 nn. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if FUNCNAME were changed or unset
2694 during a function's execution.
2696 oo. Fixed a bug that caused executing a `return' in a function to not execute
2697 a RETURN trap. The RETURN trap is inherited by shell functions only if
2698 function tracing is globally enabled or has been enabled for that function.
2700 pp. Fixed cases where var[@] was not handled exactly like var, when var is a
2703 qq. Fixed a bug that caused the first character after a SIGINT to be discarded
2704 under certain circumstances.
2706 rr. Fixed exit status code so that a suspended job returns 128+signal as its
2707 exit status (preventing commands after it in `&&' lists from being
2710 ss. Fixed a bug that caused the shell parser state to be changed by executing
2711 a shell function as a result of word completion.
2713 tt. Fixed a long-standing bug that caused '\177' characters in variable
2714 values to be discarded when expanded in double-quoted strings.
2716 uu. Fixed a bug that caused $RANDOM to be re-seeded multiple times in a
2717 subshell environment.
2719 vv. Extensive changes to the job management code to avoid the pid-reuse and
2720 pid-aliasing problems caused by retaining the exit status of too many jobs,
2721 but still retain as many background job statuses as POSIX requires.
2723 ww. Fixed a parser bug in processing \<newline> that caused things like
2728 to not work correctly.
2730 xx. `pwd -P' now sets $PWD to a directory name containing no symbolic links
2731 when in posix mode, as POSIX requires.
2733 yy. In posix mode, bash no longer sets $PWD to a name containing no symbolic
2734 links if a directory is chosen from $CDPATH.
2736 zz. The word splitting code now treats an IFS character that is not space,
2737 tab, or newline and any adjacent IFS white space as a single delimiter, as
2740 aaa. The `read' builtin now checks whether or not the number of fields read is
2741 exactly the same as the number of variables instead of just assigning the
2742 rest of the line (minus any trailing IFS white space) to the last
2743 variable. This is what POSIX/SUS/XPG all require.
2745 bbb. Fixed a bug that caused `read' to always check whether or not fd 0 was a
2746 pipe, even when reading from another file descriptor.
2748 ccc. Fixed a bug that caused short-circuiting of execution even if the return
2749 value was being inverted.
2751 ddd. Fixed a bug that caused a core dump while decoding \W escapes in PS1 if
2754 eee. Fixed a bug in `read' that counted internal quoting characters for the
2755 purposes of `read -n'.
2757 fff. Fixed a bug so that a function definition in a pipeline causes a child
2758 process to be forked at the right time.
2760 ggg. Bash will not attempt to link against a readline library that doesn't
2761 have rl_gnu_readline_p == 1.
2763 hhh. Fixed a bug that caused `read' to consume one too many characters when
2764 reading a fixed number of characters and the Nth character is a backslash.
2766 iii. Fixed a bug that caused `unset' on variables in the temporary environment
2767 to leave them set when `unset' completed.
2769 jjj. Fixed a bug that caused bash to close fd 2 if an `exec' failed and the
2772 kkk. The completion code is more careful to not turn `/' or `///' into `//',
2773 for those systems on which `//' has special meaning.
2775 lll. Fixed a bug that caused command substitution in asynchronous commands to
2776 close the wrong file descriptors.
2778 mmm. The shell no longer prints status messages about terminated background
2779 processes unless job control is active.
2781 nnn. Fixed a bug that prevented multiple consecutive invocations of `history -s'
2782 from adding all the commands to the history list.
2784 ooo. Added a couple of changes to make arithmetic expansion more consistent in
2785 all its contexts (still not perfect).
2787 ppp. Fixed a bug that caused the parser to occasionally not find the right
2788 terminating "`" in an old-style command substitution.
2790 qqq. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when the shell was reading its non-
2791 interactive input from fd 0 and fd 0 was duplicated and restored using a
2792 combination of `exec' (to save) and redirection (to restore).
2794 rrr. Fixed a problem that caused loops in sourced scripts to not be cleaned
2795 up properly when a `return' is executed.
2797 sss. Change internal command substitution completion function to append a slash
2798 to directory names in the command.
2800 2. Changes to Readline
2802 a. Fixed a bug that caused multiliine prompts to be wrapped and displayed
2805 b. Fixed a bug that caused ^P/^N in emacs mode to fail to display the current
2808 c. Fixed a problem in computing the number of invisible characters on the first
2809 line of a prompt whose length exceeds the screen width.
2811 d. Fixed vi-mode searching so that failure preserves the current line rather
2812 than the last line in the history list.
2814 e. Fixed the vi-mode `~' command (change-case) to have the correct behavior at
2815 end-of-line when manipulating multibyte characters.
2817 f. Fixed the vi-mode `r' command (change-char) to have the correct behavior at
2818 end-of-line when manipulating multibyte characters.
2820 g. Fixed multiple bugs in the redisplay of multibyte characters: displaying
2821 prompts longer than the screen width containing multibyte characters,
2823 h. Fix the calculation of the number of physical characters in the prompt
2824 string when it contains multibyte characters.
2826 i. A non-zero value for the `rl_complete_suppress_append' variable now causes
2827 no `/' to be appended to a directory name.
2829 j. Fixed forward-word and backward-word to work when words contained
2830 multibyte characters.
2832 k. Fixed a bug in finding the delimiter of a `?' substring when performing
2833 history expansion in a locale that supports multibyte characters.
2835 l. Fixed a memory leak caused by not freeing the timestamp in a history entry.
2837 m. Fixed a bug that caused "\M-x" style key bindings to not obey the setting
2838 of the `convert-meta' variable.
2840 n. Fixed saving and restoring primary prompt when prompting for incremental
2841 and non-incremental searches; search prompts now display multibyte
2842 characters correctly.
2844 o. Fixed a bug that caused keys originally bound to self-insert but shadowed
2845 by a multi-character key sequence to not be inserted.
2847 p. Fixed code so rl_prep_term_function and rl_deprep_term_function aren't
2848 dereferenced if NULL (matching the documentation).
2850 q. Extensive changes to readline to add enough state so that commands
2851 requiring additional characters (searches, multi-key sequences, numeric
2852 arguments, commands requiring an additional specifier character like
2853 vi-mode change-char, etc.) work without synchronously waiting for
2856 r. Lots of changes so readline builds and runs on MinGW.
2858 s. Readline no longer tries to modify the terminal settings when running in
2861 t. The Readline display code no longer sets the location of the last invisible
2862 character in the prompt if the \[\] sequence is empty.
2864 3. New Features in Bash
2866 a. Bash now understands LC_TIME as a special variable so that time display
2867 tracks the current locale.
2869 b. BASH_ARGC, BASH_ARGV, BASH_SOURCE, and BASH_LINENO are no longer created
2870 as `invisible' variables and may not be unset.
2872 c. In POSIX mode, if `xpg_echo' option is enabled, the `echo' builtin doesn't
2873 try to interpret any options at all, as POSIX requires.
2875 d. The `bg' builtin now accepts multiple arguments, as POSIX seems to specify.
2877 e. Fixed vi-mode word completion and glob expansion to perform tilde
2880 f. The `**' mathematic exponentiation operator is now right-associative.
2882 g. The `ulimit' builtin has new options: -i (max number of pending signals),
2883 -q (max size of POSIX message queues), and -x (max number of file locks).
2885 h. A bare `%' once again expands to the current job when used as a job
2888 i. The `+=' assignment operator (append to the value of a string or array) is
2889 now supported for assignment statements and arguments to builtin commands
2890 that accept assignment statements.
2892 j. BASH_COMMAND now preserves its value when a DEBUG trap is executed.
2894 k. The `gnu_errfmt' option is enabled automatically if the shell is running
2895 in an emacs terminal window.
2897 l. New configuration option: --single-help-strings. Causes long help text
2898 to be written as a single string; intended to ease translation.
2900 m. The COMP_WORDBREAKS variable now causes the list of word break characters
2901 to be emptied when the variable is unset.
2903 n. An unquoted expansion of $* when $IFS is empty now causes the positional
2904 parameters to be concatenated if the expansion doesn't undergo word
2907 o. Bash now inherits $_ from the environment if it appears there at startup.
2909 p. New shell option: nocasematch. If non-zero, shell pattern matching ignores
2910 case when used by `case' and `[[' commands.
2912 q. The `printf' builtin takes a new option: -v var. That causes the output
2913 to be placed into var instead of on stdout.
2915 r. By default, the shell no longer reports processes dying from SIGPIPE.
2917 s. Bash now sets the extern variable `environ' to the export environment it
2918 creates, so C library functions that call getenv() (and can't use the
2919 shell-provided replacement) get current values of environment variables.
2921 4. New Features in Readline
2923 a. The key sequence sent by the keypad `delete' key is now automatically
2924 bound to delete-char.
2926 b. A negative argument to menu-complete now cycles backward through the
2929 c. A new bindable readline variable: bind-tty-special-chars. If non-zero,
2930 readline will bind the terminal special characters to their readline
2931 equivalents when it's called (on by default).
2933 d. New bindable command: vi-rubout. Saves deleted text for possible
2934 reinsertion, as with any vi-mode `text modification' command; `X' is bound
2935 to this in vi command mode.
2937 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2938 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-release,
2939 and the previous version, bash-3.0-rc1.
2943 a. Fixed a boundary overrun that could cause segmentation faults when the
2944 completion code hands an incomplete construct to the word expansion
2947 b. Changed posix mode behavior so that an error in a variable assignment
2948 preceding a special builtin causes a non-interactive shell to exit.
2950 c. Change the directory expansion portion of the completion code to not
2951 expand embedded command substitutions if the directory name appears in
2954 d. Fixed a problem that caused `bash -r' to turn on restrictions before
2955 reading the startup files.
2957 e. Fixed a problem with the default operation of the `umask' builtin.
2959 2. Changes to Readline
2961 a. Fixed a problem with readline saving the contents of the current line
2962 before beginning a non-interactive search.
2964 b. Fixed a problem with EOF detection when using rl_event_hook.
2966 c. Fixed a problem with the vi mode `p' and `P' commands ignoring numeric
2969 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2970 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-rc1,
2971 and the previous version, bash-3.0-beta1.
2975 a. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect behavior when referecing element 0 of
2976 an array using $array, element 0 was unset, and `set -u' was enabled.
2978 b. System-specific changes for: SCO Unix 3.2, Tandem.
2980 c. Fixed a bug that caused inappropriate word splitting when a variable was
2981 expanded within a double-quoted string that also included $@.
2983 d. Fixed a bug that caused `pwd' to not display anything in physical mode
2984 when the file system had changed underneath the shell.
2986 e. Fixed a bug in the pre- and post- increment and decrement parsing in the
2987 expression evaluator that caused errors when the operands and corresponding
2988 operators were separated by whitespace.
2990 f. Fixed a bug that caused `history -p' to add an entry to the history list,
2991 counter to the documentation. (Keeps the history expansions invoked by
2992 emacs-mode command line editing from doing that as well.)
2994 g. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if `cd' is asked to print out a
2995 pathname longer than PATH_MAX characters.
2997 h. Fixed a bug that caused jobs to be put into the wrong process group under
2998 some circumstances after enabling job control with `set -m'.
3000 i. `unalias' now returns failure if no alias name arguments are supplied.
3002 j. Documented the characters not allowed to appear in an alias name.
3004 k. $* is no longer expanded as if in double quotes when it appears in the
3005 body of a here document, as the SUS seems to require.
3007 l. The `bashbug' script now uses a directory in $TMPDIR for exclusive
3008 access rather than trying to guess how the underlying OS provides for
3009 secure temporary file creation.
3011 m. Fixed a few problems with `cd' and `pwd' when asked to operate on pathnames
3012 longer than PATH_MAX characters.
3014 n. Fixed a memory leak caused when creating multiple local array variables
3015 with identical names.
3017 o. Fixed a problem with calls to getcwd() so that bash now operates better
3018 when the full pathname to the current directory is longer than PATH_MAX
3021 p. The `trap' builtin now reports an error if a single non-signal argument
3024 q. Fixed a bug that caused `umask' to not work correctly when presented
3025 with a mask of all 0s.
3027 r. When `getopts' reaches the end of options, OPTARG is unset, as POSIX
3030 s. Interactive mode now depends on whether or not stdin and stderr are
3031 connected to a tty; formerly it was stdin and stdout. POSIX requires
3034 t. Fixed vi-mode completion to work more as POSIX specifies (e.g., doing the
3035 right kind of filename generation).
3037 2. Changes to Readline
3039 a. Fixed a problem that could cause readline to refer to freed memory when
3040 moving between history lines while doing searches.
3042 b. Improvements to the code that expands and displays prompt strings
3043 containing multibyte characters.
3045 c. Fixed a problem with vi-mode not correctly remembering the numeric argument
3046 to the last `c'hange command for later use with `.'.
3048 d. Fixed a bug in vi-mode that caused multi-digit count arguments to work
3051 e. Fixed a problem in vi-mode that caused the last text modification command
3052 to not be remembered across different command lines.
3054 f. Fixed problems with changing characters and changing case at the end of
3057 3. New Features in Bash
3059 a. The `jobs', `kill', and `wait' builtins now accept job control notation
3060 even if job control is not enabled.
3062 b. The historical behavior of `trap' that allows a missing `action' argument
3063 to cause each specified signal's handling to be reset to its default is
3064 now only supported when `trap' is given a single non-option argument.
3066 4. New Features in Readline
3068 a. When listing completions, directories have a `/' appended if the
3069 `mark-directories' option has been enabled.
3071 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3072 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-beta1,
3073 and the previous version, bash-3.0-alpha.
3077 a. Fixes to build correctly when arrays are not compiled into the shell.
3079 b. Fixed command substitution to run any exit trap defined in the command
3080 substitution before returning; the exit trap is not inherited from the
3083 c. Fixes to process group synchronization code so that every child process
3084 attempts to set the terminal's process group; fixes some synchronization
3085 problems on Linux kernels that schedule the child to always run before
3088 d. Fixed processing of octal and hex constants in printf builtin for POSIX.2
3091 e. Fixed a couple of core dumps in the pattern removal code.
3093 f. Fixes to the array subrange extraction code to deal better with sparse
3096 g. Parser errors and other errors that result in the shell exiting now cause
3097 the exit trap to be run.
3099 h. Change the command substitution completion functions to not append any
3100 closing quote, because it would be inserted a closing "`" or ")".
3102 i. Fix history initialization so assignments to $histchars made in startup
3105 j. If an exit trap does not contain a call to `exit', the shell now uses
3106 the exit status of the last command executed before the trap as the exit
3107 status of the shell.
3109 k. The parser now prompts with $PS2 if it reads a newline while parsing a
3110 compound array assignment statement.
3112 l. When performing a compound array assignment, the parser doesn't treat
3113 words of the form [index]=value as assignments if they're the result of
3116 m. Fixed a bug that caused `return' executed in a trap command to make the
3117 shell think it was still running the trap.
3119 n. Fixed the value of errno set by the pathname canonicalization functions.
3121 o. Changed the grammar so that `time' alone on a line times a null command
3122 rather than being a syntax error.
3124 p. The pattern substitution code no longer performs quote removal on the
3125 pattern before trying to match it, as the pattern removal functions do.
3127 q. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when checking whether a quoted
3128 command name was being completed.
3130 r. Fixes to the pattern removal and pattern replacement expansions to deal
3131 with multibyte characters better (and faster).
3133 s. Fix to the substring expansion (${param:off[:len]}) to deal with (possibly
3134 multibyte) characters instead of raw bytes.
3136 t. Fixed a bug that caused some key bindings set in an inputrc to be ignored
3139 u. Fixed a bug that caused unsetting a local variable within a function to
3142 v. Fixed a bug that caused invalid variables to be created when using
3145 w. Fixed a bug that caused "$@" to expand incorrectly when used as the right
3146 hand side of a parameter expansion such as ${word:="$@"} if the first
3147 character of $IFS was not a space.
3149 x. Fixed a slight cosmetic problem when printing commands containing a
3150 `>&word' redirection.
3152 y. Fixed a problem that could cause here documents to not be created correctly
3153 if the system temporary directory did not allow writing.
3155 2. Changes to Readline
3157 a. Change to history expansion functions to treat `^' as equivalent to word
3158 one, as the documention states.
3160 b. Some changes to the display code to improve display and redisplay of
3161 multibyte characters.
3163 c. Changes to speed up the multibyte character redisplay code.
3165 d. Fixed a bug in the vi-mode `E' command that caused it to skip over the
3166 last character of a word if invoked while point was on the word's
3167 next-to-last character.
3169 e. Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect filename quoting when
3170 case-insensitive completion was enabled and the word being completed
3171 contained backslashes quoting word break characters.
3173 f. Fixed a bug in redisplay triggered when the prompt string contains
3174 invisible characters.
3176 g. Fixed some display (and other) bugs encountered in multibyte locales
3177 when a non-ascii character was the last character on a line.
3179 h. Fixed some display bugs caused by multibyte characters in prompt strings.
3181 i. Fixed a problem with history expansion caused by non-whitespace characters
3182 used as history word delimiters.
3184 3. New Features in Bash
3186 a. printf builtin understands two new escape sequences: \" and \?.
3188 b. `echo -e' understands two new escape sequences: \" and \?.
3190 c. The GNU `gettext' package and libintl have been integrated; the shell's
3191 messages can be translated into different languages.
3193 d. The `\W' prompt expansion now abbreviates $HOME as `~', like `\w'.
3195 e. The error message printed when bash cannot open a shell script supplied
3196 as argument 1 now includes the name of the shell, to better identify
3197 the error as coming from bash.
3199 4. New Features in Readline
3201 a. New application variable, rl_completion_quote_character, set to any
3202 quote character readline finds before it calls the application completion
3205 b. New application variable, rl_completion_suppress_quote, settable by an
3206 application completion function. If set to non-zero, readline does not
3207 attempt to append a closing quote to a completed word.
3209 c. New application variable, rl_completion_found_quote, set to a non-zero
3210 value if readline determines that the word to be completed is quoted.
3211 Set before readline calls any application completion function.
3213 d. New function hook, rl_completion_word_break_hook, called when readline
3214 needs to break a line into words when completion is attempted. Allows
3215 the word break characters to vary based on position in the line.
3217 e. New bindable command: unix-filename-rubout. Does the same thing as
3218 unix-word-rubout, but adds `/' to the set of word delimiters.
3220 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3221 This document details the changes between this version, bash-3.0-alpha,
3222 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-release.
3226 a. Fixes so that the shell will compile without some of the default options
3229 b. Fixed an error message that did not pass enough arguments to printf.
3231 c. Fixed a bug that caused input redirection to a builtin inside a script
3232 being read from standard input to result in the rest of the already-
3233 read and buffered script to be discarded.
3235 d. Fixed a bug that caused subshell initialization to close the file
3236 descriptor from which the shell was reading a script under certain
3239 e. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to not advance a string pointer over
3240 a null wide character when doing string operations.
3242 f. Fixed the internal logout code so that shells that time out waiting for
3243 input (using $TMOUT) run ~/.bash_logout.
3245 g. Portability and configuration changes for: cygwin, HP/UX, GNU/FreeBSD.
3247 h. The parser no longer adds implicit double quotes to ((...)) arithmetic
3250 i. The ((...)) arithmetic command evaluation code was fixed to not dump core
3251 when the expanded string is null.
3253 j. The ((...)) arithmetic command evaluation code was fixed to not perform
3254 variable assignments while expanding the expression.
3256 k. Fixed a bug that caused word splitting to be performed incorrectly when
3257 IFS is set, but null.
3259 l. Fixed a bug in brace expansion that caused a quoted `$' preceding an
3260 open brace to inhibit brace expansion.
3262 m. Fixed a bug that caused a leading `-' in the shell's name to cause it to
3263 not be recognized as a restricted shell.
3265 n. Fixed a bug in the arithmetic evaluation code that could cause longjmps
3266 to an invalid location and result in a core dump.
3268 o. Fixed a bug in the calculation of how many history lines are new in a
3269 single shell session when reading new history lines from a file with
3272 p. Fixed a bug in pathname canonicalization that caused the shell to dump
3273 core when presented with a pathname longer than PATH_MAX.
3275 q. Fixed the parser so that it doesn't try to compare a char variable to
3276 EOF, which fails when chars are unsigned.
3278 r. Fixed a bug in the simple command execution code that caused occasional
3281 s. The shell does a better job of saving any partial parsing state during
3282 operations which cause a command to be executed while a line is being
3285 t. The completion code now splits words more like the expansion code when
3286 $IFS is used to split.
3288 u. The locale code does a better job of recomputing the various locale
3289 variable values when LC_ALL is unset.
3291 v. The programmable completion code does a better job of dequoting expanded
3292 word lists before comparing them against the word to be matched.
3294 w. The shell no longer seg faults if the expanded value of $PS4 is null
3295 and `set -x' is enabled.
3297 x. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when a here string expanded to NULL.
3299 y. The mail checking code now makes sure the mailbox is bigger before
3300 reporting the existence of new mail.
3302 z. The parser does not try to expand $'...' and $"..." when the appear
3303 within double quotes unless the `extquote' option has been enabled with
3304 `shopt'. For backwards compatibility, it is enabled by default.
3306 aa. Fixed a bug that caused `for x; do ...' and `select x; do ... to use
3307 $@ instead of "$@" for the implicit list of arguments.
3309 bb. Fixed a bug that caused a subshell of a restricted shell (e.g., one
3310 spawned to execute a pipeline) to not exit immediately if attempting
3311 to use a command containing a slash.
3313 cc. Fixed a problem with empty replacements for a pattern that doesn't match
3314 when performing ${param/word/} expansion.
3316 dd. Word expansions performed while expanding redirections no longer search
3317 a command's temporary environment to expand variable values.
3319 ee. Improvements to the alias expansion code when expanding subsequent words
3320 because an aliase's value ends with a space.
3322 ff. `cd -' now prints the current working directory after a successful chdir
3323 even when the shell is not interactive, as the standard requires.
3325 gg. The shell does a better job of ensuring a child process dies of SIGINT
3326 before resending SIGINT to itself.
3328 hh. The arithmetic expansion variable assignment code now does the right
3329 thing when assigning to `special' variables like OPTIND.
3331 ii. When history expansion verification is enabled, the bash readline helper
3332 functions that do history expansion on the current line don't print
3335 jj. Fixed bugs with multiple consecutive alias expansion when one of the
3336 expansions ends with a space.
3338 kk. Fixed a problem in the programmable completion code that could cause core
3339 dumps when trying to initialize a set of possible completions from a
3342 ll. The \[ and \] escape characters are now ignored when decoding the prompt
3343 string if the shell is started with editing disabled.
3345 mm. Fixed a bug that could leave extra characters in a string when doing
3346 quoted null character removal.
3348 nn. Command substitution and other subshell operations no longer reset the
3349 line number (aids the bash debugger).
3351 oo. Better line number management when executing simple commands, conditional
3352 commands, for commands, and select commands.
3354 pp. The globbing code now uses malloc, with its better failure properties,
3355 rather than alloca().
3357 qq. Fixed a bug that caused expansions like #{a[2]:=value} to create the
3358 appropriate array element instead of a variable named `a[2]'.
3360 rr. Fixed a bug in the handling of a `?(...)' pattern immediately following
3361 a `*' when extglob is enabled.
3363 ss. Fixed a bug that caused a `return' invoked in an exit trap when exit is
3364 invoked in a function to misbehave.
3366 tt. Fixed a bug that caused CTLESC and CTLNUL characters to not be escaped
3367 by the internal shell string quoting functions.
3369 uu. Fixed a bug that caused quoted null characters in an expanded word list
3370 to be inappropriately assigned to an array variable when using `read -a'.
3372 vv. Fixed a bug that caused redirections accompanying a null command to persist
3373 in the current shell.
3375 ww. Fixed a bug that caused the prompt to be printed when the shell was
3376 expanding a multiline alias.
3378 xx. Fixed a bug that resulted in core dumps when the completion for a command
3379 changed the compspec.
3381 yy. Fixed a bug that caused evaluation of programmable completions to print
3382 notifications of completed jobs.
3384 zz. Bash now disables line editing when $EMACS == `t' and $TERM == `dumb'
3385 (which is what emacs shell windows do).
3387 aaa. In posix mode, `kill -l' causes signal names to be displayed without
3390 bbb. Clear error flag on standard output so it doesn't persist across multiple
3393 ccc. In posix mode, `alias' displays alias values without the leading `alias',
3394 so the output cannot be used as subsequent input.
3396 ddd. In posix mode, the `trap' builtin doesn't check whether or not its
3397 first argument is a signal specification and revert the signal handling
3398 to its original disposition if it is.
3400 eee. Fixed several bugs in the handling of "$*" and "${array[*]}" by the
3401 pattern substitution and removal expansions.
3403 fff. Fixed several problems with the handling of ${array[@]}, ${array[*]},
3404 $@, and $* by the indirect variable expansion code.
3406 ggg. Fixed a bug that did not allow `time' to be aliased.
3408 hhh. Improved the mail checking code so it won't check (and possibly cause an
3409 NFS file system mount) until MAILPATH or MAIL is given a value -- there
3410 is no default if DEFAULT_MAIL_DIRECTORY is not defined at compile time.
3411 (It is computed by configure, but can be #undef'd in config-bot.h.)
3413 iii. If the `chkwinsize' option is enabled, the shell checks for window size
3414 changes if a child process exits due to a signal.
3416 jjj. Removed the attempts to avoid adding a slash at the end of a completed
3417 executable name if there was a directory with the same name in the
3420 kkk. Fixed PATH lookup code so it treats the permission bits separately for
3421 owner, group, and other, rather than checking them all.
3423 lll. Fixed the locale code to reset the parser's idea of the character class
3424 <blank>, which controls how it splits tokens, when the locale changes.
3426 mmm. The shell now binds its special readline functions and key bindings only
3427 if the user's inputrc file has not already bound them.
3429 nnn. The shell now reports on processes that dump core due to signals when
3430 invoked as `-c command'.
3432 2. Changes to Readline
3434 a. Fixes to avoid core dumps because of null pointer references in the
3435 multibyte character code.
3437 b. Fix to avoid infinite recursion caused by certain key combinations.
3439 c. Fixed a bug that caused the vi-mode `last command' to be set incorrectly.
3441 d. Readline no longer tries to read ahead more than one line of input, even
3442 when more is available.
3444 e. Fixed the code that adjusts the point to not mishandle null wide
3447 f. Fixed a bug in the history expansion `g' modifier that caused it to skip
3450 g. Fixed a bug that caused the prompt to overwrite previous output when the
3451 output doesn't contain a newline and the locale supports multibyte
3452 characters. This same change fixes the problem of readline redisplay
3453 slowing down dramatically as the line gets longer in multibyte locales.
3455 h. History traversal with arrow keys in vi insertion mode causes the cursor
3456 to be placed at the end of the new line, like in emacs mode.
3458 i. The locale initialization code does a better job of using the right
3459 precedence and defaulting when checking the appropriate environment
3462 j. Fixed the history word tokenizer to handle <( and >( better when used as
3465 k. The overwrite mode code received several bug fixes to improve undo.
3467 l. Many speedups to the multibyte character redisplay code.
3469 m. The callback character reading interface should not hang waiting to read
3472 n. Fixed a bug with redoing vi-mode `s' command.
3474 o. The code that initializes the terminal tracks changes made to the terminal
3475 special characters with stty(1) (or equivalent), so that these changes
3476 are reflected in the readline bindings. New application-callable function
3477 to make it work: rl_tty_unset_default_bindings().
3479 p. Fixed a bug that could cause garbage to be inserted in the buffer when
3480 changing character case in vi mode when using a multibyte locale.
3482 q. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code that caused problems on systems
3483 supporting multibyte characters when moving between history lines when the
3484 new line has more glyphs but fewer bytes.
3486 r. Undo and redo now work better after exiting vi insertion mode.
3488 s. Make sure system calls are restarted after a SIGWINCH is received using
3491 t. Improvements to the code that displays possible completions when using
3492 multibyte characters.
3494 u. Fixed a problem when parsing nested if statements in inputrc files.
3496 v. The completer now takes multibyte characters into account when looking for
3497 quoted substrings on which to perform completion.
3499 w. The history search functions now perform better bounds checking on the
3502 3. New Features in Bash
3504 a. ANSI string expansion now implements the \x{hexdigits} escape.
3506 b. There is a new loadable `strftime' builtin.
3508 c. New variable, COMP_WORDBREAKS, which controls the readline completer's
3509 idea of word break characters.
3511 d. The `type' builtin no longer reports on aliases unless alias expansion
3512 will actually be performed.
3514 e. HISTCONTROL is now a colon-separated list of values, which permits
3515 more extensibility and backwards compatibility.
3517 f. HISTCONTROL may now include the `erasedups' option, which causes all lines
3518 matching a line being added to be removed from the history list.
3520 g. `configure' has a new `--enable-multibyte' argument that permits multibyte
3521 character support to be disabled even on systems that support it.
3523 h. New variables to support the bash debugger: BASH_ARGC, BASH_ARGV,
3524 BASH_SOURCE, BASH_LINENO, BASH_SUBSHELL, BASH_EXECUTION_STRING,
3527 i. FUNCNAME has been changed to support the debugger: it's now an array
3530 j. for, case, select, arithmetic commands now keep line number information
3533 k. There is a new `RETURN' trap executed when a function or sourced script
3534 returns (not inherited child processes; inherited by command substitution
3535 if function tracing is enabled and the debugger is active).
3537 l. New invocation option: --debugger. Enables debugging and turns on new
3538 `extdebug' shell option.
3540 m. New `functrace' and `errtrace' options to `set -o' cause DEBUG and ERR
3541 traps, respectively, to be inherited by shell functions. Equivalent to
3542 `set -T' and `set -E' respectively. The `functrace' option also controls
3543 whether or not the DEBUG trap is inherited by sourced scripts.
3545 n. The DEBUG trap is run before binding the variable and running the action
3546 list in a `for' command, binding the selection variable and running the
3547 query in a `select' command, and before attempting a match in a `case'
3550 o. New `--enable-debugger' option to `configure' to compile in the debugger
3553 p. `declare -F' now prints out extra line number and source file information
3554 if the `extdebug' option is set.
3556 q. If `extdebug' is enabled, a non-zero return value from a DEBUG trap causes
3557 the next command to be skipped, and a return value of 2 while in a
3558 function or sourced script forces a `return'.
3560 r. New `caller' builtin to provide a call stack for the bash debugger.
3562 s. The DEBUG trap is run just before the first command in a function body is
3563 executed, for the debugger.
3565 t. `for', `select', and `case' command heads are printed when `set -x' is
3568 u. There is a new {x..y} brace expansion, which is shorthand for {x.x+1,
3569 x+2,...,y}. x and y can be integers or single characters; the sequence
3570 may ascend or descend; the increment is always 1.
3572 v. New ksh93-like ${!array[@]} expansion, expands to all the keys (indices)
3575 w. New `force_fignore' shopt option; if enabled, suffixes specified by
3576 FIGNORE cause words to be ignored when performing word completion even
3577 if they're the only possibilities.
3579 x. New `gnu_errfmt' shopt option; if enabled, error messages follow the `gnu
3580 style' (filename:lineno:message) format.
3582 y. New `-o bashdefault' option to complete and compgen; if set, causes the
3583 whole set of bash completions to be performed if the compspec doesn't
3586 z. New `-o plusdirs' option to complete and compgen; if set, causes directory
3587 name completion to be performed and the results added to the rest of the
3588 possible completions.
3590 aa. `kill' is available as a builtin even when the shell is built without
3593 bb. New HISTTIMEFORMAT variable; value is a format string to pass to
3594 strftime(3). If set and not null, the `history' builtin prints out
3595 timestamp information according to the specified format when displaying
3596 history entries. If set, bash tells the history library to write out
3597 timestamp information when the history file is written.
3599 cc. The [[ ... ]] command has a new binary `=~' operator that performs
3600 extended regular expression (egrep-like) matching.
3602 dd. `configure' has a new `--enable-cond-regexp' option (enabled by default)
3603 to enable the =~ operator and regexp matching in [[ ... ]].
3605 ee. Subexpressions matched by the =~ operator are placed in the new
3606 BASH_REMATCH array variable.
3608 ff. New `failglob' option that causes an expansion error when pathname
3609 expansion fails to produce a match.
3611 gg. New `set -o pipefail' option that causes a pipeline to return a failure
3612 status if any of the processes in the pipeline fail, not just the last
3615 4. New Features in Readline
3617 a. History expansion has a new `a' modifier equivalent to the `g' modifier
3618 for compatibility with the BSD csh.
3620 b. History expansion has a new `G' modifier equivalent to the BSD csh `g'
3621 modifier, which performs a substitution once per word.
3623 c. All non-incremental search operations may now undo the operation of
3624 replacing the current line with the history line.
3626 d. The text inserted by an `a' command in vi mode can be reinserted with
3629 e. New bindable variable, `show-all-if-unmodified'. If set, the readline
3630 completer will list possible completions immediately if there is more
3631 than one completion and partial completion cannot be performed.
3633 f. There is a new application-callable `free_history_entry()' function.
3635 g. History list entries now contain timestamp information; the history file
3636 functions know how to read and write timestamp information associated
3639 h. Four new key binding functions have been added:
3641 rl_bind_key_if_unbound()
3642 rl_bind_key_if_unbound_in_map()
3643 rl_bind_keyseq_if_unbound()
3644 rl_bind_keyseq_if_unbound_in_map()
3646 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3647 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-release,
3648 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-beta2.
3652 a. Fixed an off-by-one error in the function that translates job
3655 b. Note that we're running under Emacs and disable line editing if
3658 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3659 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-beta2,
3660 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-beta1.
3664 a. Fixed the /= and %= arithmetic operators to catch division by zero.
3666 b. Added putenv, setenv, unsetenv to getenv replacement for completeness.
3668 c. Fixed a bug that could cause the -O expand_aliases invocation option
3671 d. Fixed a problem with process substitution that resulted in incorrect
3672 behavior when the number of process substitutions in an individual
3673 command approached 64.
3675 2. Changes to Readline
3677 a. Fixed a problem with backward-char-search when on a system with support
3678 for multibyte characters when running in a locale without any multibyte
3681 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3682 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-beta1,
3683 and the previous version, bash-2.05b-alpha1.
3687 a. Fixed a problem when parsing a POSIX.2 character class name while
3688 evaluating a bracket expression containing multibyte characters.
3690 b. Changed the help text for `bind' to make it clear that any command
3691 that may be placed in ~/.inputrc is a valid argument to `bind'.
3693 c. Added `help' builtin entries for `((', `[[', and arithmetic for.
3695 d. malloc updated again:
3696 o slightly better overflow and underflow detection by putting the
3697 chunk size at the beginning and end of the chunk and making
3698 sure they match in free/realloc
3699 o partial page allocated to make things page-aligned no longer
3701 o block coalescing now enabled by default
3702 o splitting and coalescing enabled for 32-byte chunks, the most
3703 common size requested
3704 o fixed a problem that resulted in spurious underflow messages and
3706 o bin sizes are precomputed and stored in an array rather than
3707 being computed at run time
3708 o malloc will return memory blocks back to the system if the block
3709 being freed is at the top of the heap and of sufficient size to
3711 o malloc/free/realloc now inline memset instead of calling the
3712 libc function; uses Duff's device for good performance
3714 e. Check for getservent(); make the service name completion code dependent
3717 f. Changed the readline callback that executes a command bound to a key
3718 sequence to not save the executed command on the history list and to
3719 save and restore the parsing state.
3721 g. Changes to lib/sh/snprintf.c: fixed some bugs in the `g' and `G'
3722 floating point format display; implemented the "'" flag character
3723 that turns on thousands' grouping; fixed behavior on systems where
3724 MB_CUR_MAX does not evaluate to a constant.
3726 h. The `unset' builtin no longer returns a failure status when asked to
3727 unset a previously-unset variable or function.
3729 i. Changes to the build system to make it easier to cross-compile bash
3730 for different systems.
3732 j. Added `,' to the characters that are backslash-escaped during filename
3733 completion, to avoid problems with complete-into-braces and RCS filenames
3736 k. Some changes to the multibyte character support code to avoid many calls
3739 l. Bash now correctly honors setting LANG to some value when LC_ALL does not
3740 already have a value.
3742 m. Fixed a bug that could cause SIGSEGV when processing nested traps with
3745 n. The `source/.' builtin now restores the positional parameters when it
3746 returns unless they were changed using the `set' builtin during the file's
3749 o. Fixed a bug that caused a syntax error when a command was terminated by
3752 2. New Features in Bash
3754 a. There is now support for placing the long help text into separate files
3755 installed into ${datadir}/bash. Not enabled by default; can be turned
3756 on with `--enable-separate-helpfiles' option to configure.
3758 b. All builtins that take operands accept a `--' pseudo-option, except
3761 c. The `echo' builtin now accepts \0xxx (zero to three octal digits following
3762 the `0') in addition to \xxx (one to three octal digits) for SUSv3/XPG6/
3763 POSIX.1-2001 compliance.
3765 3. Changes to Readline
3767 a. Fixed a small problem in _rl_insert_char with multibyte characters.
3769 b. Fixes from IBM for line wrapping problems when using multibyte characters.
3771 c. Fixed a problem which caused the display to be messed up when the last
3772 line of a multi-line prompt (possibly containing invisible characters)
3773 was longer than the screen width.
3775 d. Fixed a problem with the vi-mode `r' command that ocurred on systems with
3776 support for multibyte characters when running in a locale without any
3777 multibyte characters.
3779 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3780 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05b-alpha1,
3781 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-release.
3785 a. Some changes to work around inlining differences between compilers.
3787 b. Added more prototypes for internal shell typedefs, to catch argument
3788 passing errors when using pointers to functions.
3790 c. The `cd' builtin now fails in posix mode when a valid directory cannot be
3791 constructed from a relative pathname argument and the $PWD using pathname
3792 canonicalization, and the -P option has not been supplied. Previously,
3793 the shell would attempt to use what the user typed, leading to weird
3794 values for $PWD and discrepancies between the value of $PWD and the
3795 actual working directory.
3797 d. The `cd' builtin now resets $PWD when canonicalization fails but a chdir
3798 to the pathname passed as an argument succeeds (when not in posix mode).
3800 e. The `fc' builtin has been fixed, as POSIX requires, to use the closest
3801 history position in range when given an out-of-range argument.
3803 f. The history file loading code was changed to allow lines to be saved in
3804 the history list from the shell startup files.
3806 g. `history -s args' now works better in compound commands.
3808 h. The tilde expansion code was fixed to better recognize when it's being
3809 invoked in an assignment context, which enables expansion after `='
3812 i. Fixed the command name completion code so a slash is no longer appended
3813 to a single match if there happens to be a directory with that name in
3816 j. Fixed compound array assignment to no longer perform alias expansion, to
3817 allow reserved words as array members, and to not produce extra output
3818 when the `-v' option had been enabled.
3820 k. Fixed the programmable completion code to better handle newlines in lists
3821 of possible completions (e.g., `complete -W').
3823 l. Removed the reserved words from the `bash-builtins' manual page.
3825 m. Parser error reporting now attempts to do a better job of identifying the
3826 token in error rather than doing straight textual analysis.
3828 n. Fixes for Inf/NaN, locales, wide/multibyte characters and zero-length
3829 arguments in the library snprintf(3) replacement.
3831 o. `read -e' no longer does command name completion on the first word on
3832 the line being read.
3834 p. `select' now returns failure if the read of the user's selection fails.
3836 q. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when setting $PIPESTATUS.
3838 r. Fixes to not allocate so many job slots when the shell is running a loop
3839 with job control enabled in a subshell of an interactive shell.
3841 s. Fixed a bug in the trap code that caused traps to be inherited by
3842 command substitutions in some cases.
3844 t. Fixed a bug that could cause alias expansion to inappropriately expand
3845 the word following the alias.
3847 u. Fixed a bug in the `kill' builtin that mishandled negative pid arguments.
3849 v. The parser is less lenient when parsing assignment statements where the
3850 characters before the `=' don't comprise a valid identifier.
3852 w. The arithmetic expression evaluation code now honors the setting of the
3853 `-u' option when expanding variable names.
3855 x. Fixed the arithmetic evaluation code to allow array subscripts to be
3856 assigned (`let b[7]=42') and auto-incremented and auto-decremented
3859 y. Reimplemented the existing prompt string date and time expansions using
3860 strftime(3), which changed the output of \@ in some locales.
3862 z. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when a special shell variable
3863 (like RANDOM) was converted to an array with a variable assignment.
3865 aa. Fixed a bug that would reset the handler for a signal the user had
3866 trapped to a function that would exit the shell when setting the exit
3867 trap in a non-interactive shell.
3869 bb. Changed the execve(2) wrapper code to check whether or not a failing
3870 command is a directory before looking at whether a `#!' interpreter
3871 failed for some reason.
3873 cc. Fixed a bug in the command printing code so it no longer inserts a `;'
3874 after a newline, which produces a syntax error when reused as input.
3876 dd. The code that expands $PS4 no longer inherits the `-x' flag.
3878 ee. The bash-specific completion functions may now take advantage of the
3879 double-TAB and M-? features of the standard readline completion
3882 ff. The mail checking code no longer prints a message if the checked file's
3883 size has not increased, even if the access time is less than the modification time.
3885 gg. Rewrote the variable symbol table code: there is now a stack of
3886 contexts, each possibly including a separate symbol table; there can
3887 be more than one temporary environment supplied to nested invocations
3888 of `./source'; the temporary environments no longer require so much
3889 special-case code; shell functions now handle the temporary environment
3890 and local variables more consistently; function scope exit is faster now
3891 that the entire symbol table does not have to be traversed to dispose of
3892 local variables; it is now easier to push vars from the temporary
3893 environment to the shell's variable table in posix mode; some duplicated
3894 code has been removed.
3896 hh. Regularized the error message printing code; builtin_error is now called
3897 more consistently, and common error message strings are handled by small
3898 functions. This should make eventual message translation easier.
3900 ii. Error messages now include the line number in a script when the shell
3903 jj. Array subscript expansion now takes place even when the array variable is
3904 unset, so side effects will take place.
3906 kk. Fixed a bug in the SICGHLD child-reaping code so that it won't find
3907 jobs already marked as terminated if the OS reuses pids quickly enough.
3909 ll. Fixed a bug that could cause a signal to not interrupt the `wait'
3910 builtin while it was waiting for a background process to terminate.
3912 mm. A couple of changes to make it easier for multiple shells to share history
3913 files using `history -n', `history -r', and `history -w'.
3915 nn. The `getopts' builtin always increments OPTIND to point to the next
3916 option to be handled when an option is returned, whether it's valid
3917 or not, as POSIX 1003.x-2001 requires.
3919 oo. Changed some parts of the expansion code to avoid allocating and
3920 immediately freeing memory without using the results for anything.
3922 pp. The shell now keeps track of $IFS internally, updating its internal map
3923 each time the variable is assigned a new value (or at local scope exit).
3924 This saves thousands of hash lookups for IFS, which, while individually
3927 qq. Rewrote the hash table code: searching and insertion are much faster now,
3928 and it uses a better string hashing function; augmented the function
3929 interface to simplify other parts of the code and remove duplicated code
3931 rr. The shell now uses a simple, generic `object cache' for allocating and
3932 caching words and word lists, which were the major users of
3935 ss. Fixed the assignment statement parsing code to allow whitespace and
3936 newlines in subscripts when performing array element assignment.
3938 tt. The shell now issues many fewer calls to sigprocmask and other signal
3939 masking system calls.
3941 uu. Fixed the `test' and conditional command file comparison operators to
3942 work right when one file has a non-positive timestamp and the other
3945 vv. Fixed some cases where the special characters '\001' and '\177' in the
3946 values of variables or positional parameters caused incorrect expansion
3949 2. Changes to Readline
3951 a. Fixed output of comment-begin character when listing variable values.
3953 b. Added some default key bindings for common escape sequences produced by
3956 c. Fixed the mark handling code to be more emacs-compatible.
3958 d. A bug was fixed in the code that prints possible completions to keep it
3959 from printing empty strings in certain circumstances.
3961 e. Change the key sequence printing code to print ESC as M\- if ESC is a
3962 meta-prefix character -- it's easier for users to understand than \e.
3964 f. Fixed unstifle_history() to return values that match the documentation.
3966 g. Fixed the event loop (rl_event_hook) to handle the case where the input
3967 file descriptor is invalidated.
3969 h. Fixed the prompt display code to work better when the application has a
3970 custom redisplay function.
3972 i. Changes to make reading and writing the history file a little faster, and
3973 to cope with huge history files without calling abort(3) from xmalloc.
3975 j. The vi-mode `S' and `s' commands are now undone correctly.
3977 3. New Features in Bash
3979 a. If set, TMOUT is the default timeout for the `read' builtin.
3981 b. `type' has two new options: `-f' suppresses shell function lookup, and
3982 `-P' forces a $PATH search.
3984 c. New code to handle multibyte characters.
3986 d. `select' was changed to be more ksh-compatible, in that the menu is
3987 reprinted each time through the loop only if REPLY is set to NULL.
3988 The previous behavior is available as a compile-time option.
3990 e. `complete -d' and `complete -o dirnames' now force a slash to be
3991 appended to names which are symlinks to directories.
3993 f. There is now a bindable edit-and-execute-command readline command,
3994 like the vi-mode `v' command, bound to C-xC-e in emacs mode.
3996 g. Added support for ksh93-like [:word:] character class in pattern matching.
3998 h. The $'...' quoting construct now expands \cX to Control-X.
4000 i. A new \D{...} prompt expansion; passes the `...' to strftime and inserts
4001 the result into the expanded prompt.
4003 j. The shell now performs arithmetic in the largest integer size the
4004 machine supports (intmax_t), instead of long.
4006 k. If a numeric argument is supplied to one of the bash globbing completion
4007 functions, a `*' is appended to the word before expansion is attempted.
4009 l. The bash globbing completion functions now allow completions to be listed
4010 with double tabs or if `show-all-if-ambiguous' is set.
4012 m. New `-o nospace' option for `complete' and `compgen' builtins; suppresses
4013 readline's appending a space to the completed word.
4015 n. New `here-string' redirection operator: <<< word.
4017 o. When displaying variables, function attributes and definitions are shown
4018 separately, allowing them to be re-used as input (attempting to re-use
4019 the old output would result in syntax errors).
4021 p. There is a new configuration option `--enable-mem-scramble', controls
4022 bash malloc behavior of writing garbage characters into memory at
4023 allocation and free time.
4025 q. The `complete' and `compgen' builtins now have a new `-s/-A service'
4026 option to complete on names from /etc/services.
4028 r. `read' has a new `-u fd' option to read from a specified file descriptor.
4030 s. Fix the completion code so that expansion errors in a directory name
4031 don't cause a longjmp back to the command loop.
4033 t. Fixed word completion inside command substitution to work a little more
4036 u. The `printf' %q format specifier now uses $'...' quoting to print the
4037 argument if it contains non-printing characters.
4039 v. The `declare' and `typeset' builtins have a new `-t' option. When applied
4040 to functions, it causes the DEBUG trap to be inherited by the named
4041 function. Currently has no effect on variables.
4043 w. The DEBUG trap is now run *before* simple commands, ((...)) commands,
4044 [[...]] conditional commands, and for ((...)) loops.
4046 x. The expansion of $LINENO inside a shell function is only relative to the
4047 function start if the shell is interactive -- if the shell is running a
4048 script, $LINENO expands to the line number in the script. This is as
4049 POSIX-2001 requires.
4051 y. The bash debugger in examples/bashdb has been modified to work with the
4052 new DEBUG trap semantics, the command set has been made more gdb-like,
4053 and the changes to $LINENO make debugging functions work better. Code
4056 z. New [n]<&word- and [n]>&word- redirections from ksh93 -- move fds (dup
4059 aa. There is a new `-l' invocation option, equivalent to `--login'.
4061 bb. The `hash' builtin has a new `-l' option to list contents in a reusable
4062 format, and a `-d' option to remove a name from the hash table.
4064 4. New Features in Readline
4066 a. Support for key `subsequences': allows, e.g., ESC and ESC-a to both
4067 be bound to readline functions. Now the arrow keys may be used in vi
4070 b. When listing completions, and the number of lines displayed is more than
4071 the screen length, readline uses an internal pager to display the results.
4072 This is controlled by the `page-completions' variable (default on).
4074 c. New code to handle editing and displaying multibyte characters.
4076 d. The behavior introduced in bash-2.05a of deciding whether or not to
4077 append a slash to a completed name that is a symlink to a directory has
4078 been made optional, controlled by the `mark-symlinked-directories'
4079 variable (default is the 2.05a behavior).
4081 e. The `insert-comment' command now acts as a toggle if given a numeric
4082 argument: if the first characters on the line don't specify a
4083 comment, insert one; if they do, delete the comment text
4085 f. New application-settable completion variable:
4086 rl_completion_mark_symlink_dirs, allows an application's completion
4087 function to temporarily override the user's preference for appending
4088 slashes to names which are symlinks to directories.
4090 g. New function available to application completion functions:
4091 rl_completion_mode, to tell how the completion function was invoked
4092 and decide which argument to supply to rl_complete_internal (to list
4095 h. Readline now has an overwrite mode, toggled by the `overwrite-mode'
4096 bindable command, which could be bound to `Insert'.
4098 i. New application-settable completion variable:
4099 rl_completion_suppress_append, inhibits appending of
4100 rl_completion_append_character to completed words.
4102 j. New key bindings when reading an incremental search string: ^W yanks
4103 the currently-matched word out of the current line into the search
4104 string; ^Y yanks the rest of the current line into the search string,
4105 DEL or ^H deletes characters from the search string.
4107 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4108 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-release,
4109 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-rc1.
4113 a. Fixed the `printf' builtin so that the variable name supplied as an
4114 argument to a %n conversion must be a valid shell identifier.
4116 b. Improved the random number generator slightly.
4118 c. Changes to configuration to not put -I/usr/include into $CFLAGS, since
4119 it messes up some includes.
4121 d. Corrected description of POSIXLY_CORRECT in man page and info manual.
4123 e. Fixed a couple of cases of incorrect function prototypes that sneaked
4124 through and caused compilation problems.
4126 f. A few changes to avoid potential core dumps in the programmable completion
4129 g. Fixed a configure problem that could cause a non-existent file to show
4132 h. Fixed a configure problem that could cause siglist.o to not be built when
4135 i. Changes to the strtoimax and strtoumax replacement functions to work
4136 around buggy compilers.
4138 j. Fixed a problem with the snprintf replacement function that could
4139 potentially cause a core dump.
4141 2. Changes to Readline
4143 a. Fixed a locale-specific problem in the vi-mode `goto mark' command.
4145 b. Fixed Makefile to not put -I/usr/include into CFLAGS, since it can cause
4146 include file problems.
4148 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4149 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-rc1,
4150 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-beta1.
4154 a. Fixed the snprintf replacement to correctly implement the `alternate form'
4155 of the %g and %G conversions.
4157 b. Fixed snprintf to correctly handle the optional precision with the %g and
4160 c. Fixed the arithmetic evaluation code to correct the values of `@' and `_'
4161 when translating base-64 constants (they were backwards).
4163 d. New library functions for formatting long and long long ints.
4165 e. Fixed a few places where negative array subscripts could have occurred,
4166 mostly as the result of systems using signed characters.
4168 f. Fixed a few places that assumed a pid_t was no wider than an int.
4170 g. Fixed the `maildir' mail checking code to work on systems where a
4171 `struct stat' doesn't include an `st_blocks' member.
4173 h. Fixed snprintf to make `unsigned long long' conversion formats (%llu)
4176 i. Fixed snprintf to not print a sign when asked to do an unsigned conversion.
4178 j. Made configure changes to avoid compiling empty source files in lib/sh.
4180 k. New replacement functions (if necessary) for strtoull, strtoll, strtoimax,
4183 l. The `printf' builtin now handles the `ll' and `j' length modifiers
4184 directly, since they can affect the type and width of the argument
4185 passed to printf(3).
4187 m. Renamed a number of the bash-specific autoconf macros in aclocal.m4 to
4188 have more sytematic naming, with accompanying changes to configure.in.
4190 n. Fixed snprintf to handle long doubles and the %a/%A conversions by
4191 falling back to sprintf, as long as sprintf supports them.
4193 o. Fixed return value from vsnprintf/snprintf to be the number of characters
4194 that would have been printed, even if that number exceeds the buffer
4195 size passed as an argument.
4197 p. Bash no longer attempts to define its own versions of some ctype macros
4198 if they are implemented as functions in libc but not as macros in
4201 q. Changed the variable printing code (used by `set', `export', etc.) to
4202 not use the $'...' syntax when in posix mode, since that caused
4203 interoperability problems with other shells (most notably with autoconf).
4204 When not in posix mode, it uses $'...' if the string to be printed
4205 contains non-printing characters and regular single quotes otherwise.
4207 r. snprintf now recognizes the %F conversion.
4209 s. Fixed a bug that could cause the wrong status to be returned by a shell
4210 function when the shell is compiled without job control and a null
4211 command containing a command substutition was executed in the function.
4213 t. When in posix mode, the default value for MAILCHECK is 600.
4215 u. Bash only initializes FUNCNAME, GROUPS, and DIRSTACK as special variables
4216 if they're not in the initial environment.
4218 v. If SECONDS appears in the initial environment with a valid integer value,
4219 bash uses that as the starting value, as if an assignment had been
4222 w. Bash no longer auto-exports HOME, PATH, SHELL, or TERM, even though it
4223 gives them default values if they don't appear in the initial environment.
4225 x. Bash no longer auto-exports HOSTNAME, HOSTTYPE, MACHTYPE, or OSTYPE,
4226 even if it assigns them default values.
4228 y. Bash no longer removes the export attribute from SSH_CLIENT or SSH2_CLIENT
4229 if they appear in the initial environment.
4231 z. Bash no longer attempts to discover if it's being run by sshd in order to
4232 run the startup files. If the SSH_SOURCE_BASHRC is uncommented in
4233 config-top.h it will attempt to do so as previously, but that's commented
4234 out in the distributed version.
4236 aa. Fixed a typo in the code that tests for LC_NUMERIC.
4238 bb. The POSIXLY_CORRECT shell variable and its effects are now documented.
4240 cc. Some changes to several of the support shell scripts included in the
4241 definitions to try to avoid race conditions and attacks.
4243 dd. Several changes to avoid warnings from `gcc -Wall'.
4245 ee. Fixed a problem with the `unset' builtin that could cause incorrect
4246 results if asked to unset a variable and an array subscript in the
4249 ff. A few changes to the shell's temporary file creation code to avoid
4250 potential file descriptor leaks and to prefer the system's idea of
4251 the temporary directory to use.
4253 gg. Fixes to build with the C alloca in lib/malloc/alloca.c if the system
4254 requires it but the shell has been configured --without-bash-malloc.
4256 hh. Updated the documentation to note that only interactive shells resend
4257 SIGHUP to all jobs before exiting.
4259 ii. Fixes to only pass unquoted tilde words to tilde_expand, rather than
4260 rely on tilde_expand or getpwnam(3) to handle the quotes (MacOS 10.x
4261 will remove backslashes in any login name passed to getpwnam(3)).
4263 jj. Small change from Paul Eggert to make LINENO right in commands run with
4266 2. New Features in Bash
4268 a. The `printf' builtin now handles the %a and %A conversions if they're
4269 implemented by printf(3).
4271 b. The `printf' builtin now handles the %F conversion (just about like %f).
4273 c. The `printf' builtin now handles the %n conversion like printf(3). The
4274 corresponding argument is the name of a shell variable to which the
4277 3. Changes to Readline
4279 a. Fixed a few places where negative array subscripts could have occurred.
4281 b. Fixed the vi-mode code to use a better method to determine the bounds of
4282 the array used to hold the marks.
4284 c. Fixed the defines in chardefs.h to work better when chars are signed.
4286 d. Fixed configure.in to use the new names for bash autoconf macros.
4288 e. Readline no longer attempts to define its own versions of some ctype
4289 macros if they are implemented as functions in libc but not as macros in
4292 f. Fixed a problem where rl_backward could possibly set point to before
4293 the beginning of the line.
4295 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4296 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-beta1,
4297 and the previous version, bash-2.05a-alpha1.
4301 a. Fixed a bug in the evalution of arithmetic `for' statements when the
4302 expanded expression is NULL.
4304 b. Fixed an unassigned variable problem in the redirection printing code.
4306 c. Added more prototypes to extern function declarations in the header
4307 files and to static function declarations in C source files.
4309 d. Make sure called functions have a prototype in scope, to get the arguments
4310 and return values right instead of casting. Removed extern function
4311 declarations from C source files that were already included in header
4314 e. Changed some function arguments to use function typedefs in general.h so
4315 the prototypes can be checked. The only use of Function and VFunction
4316 now is for unwind-protects.
4318 f. More const changes to function arguments and appropriate variables.
4320 g. Changed the mail checking support to handle `maildir'-style mail
4323 h. Augmented the bash malloc to pass in the file and line number information
4324 for each malloc, realloc, and free. This should result in better error
4327 i. The `old' gnu malloc is no longer a configuration option.
4329 j. Augmented the bash malloc with optional tracing and registering allocated
4332 k. Prompt string decoding now saves and restores the value of $? when it
4333 expands the prompt string, so command substitutions don't change $?.
4335 i. Array indices are now `long', since shell arithmetic is performed as long,
4336 and the internal arrayind_t type is used consistently.
4338 j. Some more `unsigned char *' fixes from Paul Eggert.
4340 k. Fixed a bad call to builtin_error that could cause core dumps when making
4343 l. `return' may no longer be used to terminate a `select' command, for
4344 compatibility with ksh.
4346 m. Changed code that reads octal numbers to do a better job of detecting
4349 n. The time formatting code no longer uses absolute indices into a buffer,
4350 because the buffer size changes depending on the size of a `time_t'.
4352 o. `umask' now prints four digits when printing in octal mode, for
4353 compatibility with other shells.
4355 p. Lots of changes to the `printf' builtin from Paul Eggert: it handles `L'
4356 formats and long doubles better, and internal functions have been
4357 simpified where appropriate.
4359 q. Some `time_t' fixes for machines were a time_t is bigger than a long.
4361 r. Replaced some bash-specific autoconf macros with standard equivalents.
4363 s. Improvmed the code that constructs temporary filenames to make the
4364 generated names a bit more random.
4366 t. Added code that checks for ascii before calling any of the is* ctype
4369 u. Changed some places where a `char' was used as an array subscript to use
4370 `unsigned char', since a `char' can be negative if it's signed by default.
4372 v. Lots of changes to the `ulimit' builtin from Paul Eggert to add support
4373 for the new POSIX-200x RLIM_SAVED_CUR and RLIM_SAVED_MAX values and
4376 w. `ulimit' now prints the description of a resource in any error message
4377 relating to fetching or setting that resource's limits.
4379 x. The `snprintf' replacement now computes maximum values at compile
4380 time rather than using huge constants for things like long long.
4382 y. Interactive shells now ignore `set -n'.
4384 z. Changed the malloc bookkeeping information so that it's now 8 bytes
4385 instead of 12 on most 32-bit machines (saving 4 bytes per allocation),
4386 restoring 8-byte alignment.
4388 aa. The malloc error reporting code now attempts to print the file and line
4389 number of the call that caused the error.
4391 bb. Changed the redirection error reporting code to catch EBADF errors and
4392 report the file descriptor number rather than the file being redirected
4393 to or from (e.g., things like `exec 4242<x' where 4242 is an out-of-range
4396 cc. `printf', `echo -e', and the $'...' code now process only two hex digits
4397 after a `\x' escape sequence for compatibility with other shells, and
4398 the documentation was changed to note that the octal and hex escape
4399 sequences result in an eight-bit value rather than strict ASCII.
4401 2. Changes to Readline
4403 a. The completion code now attempts to do a better job of preserving the
4404 case of the word the user typed if ignoring case in completions.
4406 b. Readline defaults to not echoing the input and lets the terminal
4407 initialization code enable echoing if there is a controlling terminal.
4409 c. The key binding code now processes only two hex digits after a `\x'
4410 escape sequence, and the documentation was changed to note that the
4411 octal and hex escape sequences result in an eight-bit value rather
4414 3. New Features in Bash
4416 a. The builtin `ulimit' now takes two new non-numeric arguments: `hard',
4417 meaning the current hard limit, and `soft', meaning the current soft
4418 limit, in addition to `unlimited'
4420 b. `ulimit' now prints the option letter associated with a particular
4421 resource when printing more than one limit.
4423 c. `ulimit' prints `hard' or `soft' when a value is not `unlimited' but is
4424 one of RLIM_SAVED_MAX or RLIM_SAVED_CUR, respectively.
4426 4. New Features in Readline
4428 a. New bindable variable `history-preserve-point'. If set, the history
4429 code attempts to place the user at the same location on each history
4430 line retrived with previous-history or next-history.
4432 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4433 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05a-alpha1,
4434 and the previous version, bash-2.05-release.
4438 a. Better checks in the redirection code for write errors.
4440 b. bashbug now uses $TMPDIR, defaulting to /tmp, and uses mktemp(1) more
4443 c. System-specific configuration changes for: Interix, OpenBSD, FreeBSD,
4446 d. Some more `const' cleanups through the code.
4448 e. Fixed a typo in the /dev/fd redirection code, better checks for valid
4449 numeric fds in /dev/fd.
4451 f. Fixed many parts of the shell to handle integer overflow more gracefully
4452 and to do more stringent checks for valid numbers.
4454 g. Fixed mksignames to include config.h.
4456 h. Fixed an uninitialized variable problem that could cause the shell to core
4457 dump when replacing characters in a string.
4459 i. New mechanism for updating the patch level when official patches are
4460 released (patchlevel.h).
4462 j. configure.in changed to no longer require external files _distribution and
4465 k. Fixed non-interactive shell initialization problem when bash started as
4468 l. Fixed printf builtin conversion error handling to be POSIX.2-conformant.
4470 m. autoconf-2.52 is now used to build configure; autoconf-2.50 or newer is
4471 required. Some of the bash-specific macros were removed, since they are
4474 n. Startup files and files read with source or `.' are no longer required to
4477 o. Fixed core dump in builtin printf when user-supplied precision or field
4480 p. Fixed builtin printf to treat a negative field width as a positive field
4481 width with left-justification.
4483 r. New unwind-protect implementation from Paul Eggert.
4485 s. Fixed an inadvertently-unclosed comment in the bash completion code that
4486 caused programmable completions to not add trailing slashes or spaces to
4489 t. Fixed the process substitution code to cope better when stdin is closed.
4491 v. Fixes, mostly from Paul Eggert, for a few possible buffer overflows in
4494 w. Fixes from Paul Eggert to avoid most of the type casts in the shell code,
4495 and use more appropriate types for a number of variables.
4497 x. Command substition no longer inherits the DEBUG trap.
4499 y. Some fixes to the process substition code on machines without /dev/fd so
4500 that named pipes are not removed inappropriately.
4502 z. The loadable `getconf' builtin is now much more complete, and will become
4503 part of the shell in the future.
4505 aa. The select command no longer terminates on a `return', so it can be used
4506 to return from an enclosing function (as ksh does it).
4508 bb. Fixed the extended pattern matching code to behave better when presented
4509 with incorrectly-formed patterns.
4511 cc. Some changes were made with the intent of making cross-compilation easier.
4513 dd. The network code (/dev/tcp and /dev/udp redirections) uses getaddrinfo(3)
4514 if it's available, which adds support for IPv6.
4516 ee. Subshells of login shells no longer source ~/.bash_logout when they exit.
4518 ff. Fixes so that subshells don't exit inappropriately if the -e option has
4521 gg. Restricted shells no longer allow functions to be exported.
4523 hh. Changes to the pattern matching code so extended pattern matching works
4524 on systems with deficient shared library implementations, like MacOS X.
4526 ii. Better error messages when a script with a leading `#!interp' fails
4527 to execute because of problems with `interp'.
4529 jj. Fixed `compgen' to handle the `-o default' option better.
4531 kk. Fixed the job control code to force an asynchronous process's standard
4532 input to /dev/null only if job control is not active.
4534 ll. Fixed a possible infinite recursion problem when `fc ""=abc' (a null
4535 pattern) is used to re-execute a previous command.
4537 mm. Fixed `declare [-a] var=value' to assign VALUE to element 0 if VAR is an
4538 array variable. Similarly for `declare [-a] var[N]=value'. This is like
4541 nn. Fixed a bug that caused `read -a aname' to work even if ANAME had been
4544 oo. Fixed a possible integer overflow problem when constructing names for
4547 2. New Features in Bash
4549 a. Added support for DESTDIR installation root prefix, so you can do a
4550 `make install DESTDIR=bash-root' and do easier binary packaging.
4552 b. Added support for builtin printf "'" flag character as per latest POSIX
4555 c. Support for POSIX.2 printf(1) length specifiers `j', `t', and `z' (from
4558 d. New autoconf macro, RL_LIB_READLINE_VERSION, for use by other applications
4559 (bash doesn't use very much of what it returns).
4561 e. `set [-+]o nolog' is recognized as required by the latest POSIX drafts,
4564 f. New read-only `shopt' option: login_shell. Set to non-zero value if the
4565 shell is a login shell.
4567 g. New `\A' prompt string escape sequence; expands to time in 24 HH:MM format.
4569 h. New `-A group/-g' option to complete and compgen; does group name
4572 i. New `-t' option to `hash' to list hash values for each filename argument.
4574 j. New [-+]O invocation option to set and unset `shopt' options at startup.
4576 k. configure's `--with-installed-readline' option now takes an optional
4577 `=PATH' suffix to set the root of the tree where readline is installed
4580 l. The ksh-like `ERR' trap has been added. The `ERR' trap will be run
4581 whenever the shell would have exited if the -e option were enabled.
4582 It is not inherited by shell functions.
4584 m. `readonly', `export', and `declare' now print variables which have been
4585 given attributes but not set by assigning a value as just a command and
4586 a variable name (like `export foo') when listing, as the latest POSIX
4589 n. `bashbug' now requires that the subject be changed from the default.
4591 o. configure has a new `--enable-largefile' option, like other GNU utilities.
4593 p. `for' loops now allow empty word lists after `in', like the latest POSIX
4596 3. Changes to Readline
4598 a. More `const' and type casting fixes.
4600 b. Changed rl_message() to use vsnprintf(3) (if available) to fix buffer
4603 c. The completion code no longer appends a `/' or ` ' to a match when
4604 completing a symbolic link that resolves to a directory name, unless
4605 the match does not add anything to the word being completed. This
4606 means that a tab will complete the word up to the full name, but not
4607 add anything, and a subsequent tab will add a slash.
4609 d. Fixed a trivial typo that made the vi-mode `dT' command not work.
4611 e. Fixed the tty code so that ^S and ^Q can be inserted with rl_quoted_insert.
4613 f. Fixed the tty code so that ^V works more than once.
4615 g. Changed the use of __P((...)) for function prototypes to PARAMS((...))
4616 because the use of __P in typedefs conflicted g++ and glibc.
4618 4. New Features in Readline
4620 a. Added extern declaration for rl_get_termcap to readline.h, making it a
4621 public function (it was always there, just not in readline.h).
4623 b. New #defines in readline.h: RL_READLINE_VERSION, currently 0x0402,
4624 RL_VERSION_MAJOR, currently 4, and RL_VERSION_MINOR, currently 2.
4626 c. New readline variable: rl_readline_version, mirrors RL_READLINE_VERSION.
4628 d. New bindable boolean readline variable: match-hidden-files. Controls
4629 completion of files beginning with a `.' (on Unix). Enabled by default.
4631 e. The history expansion code now allows any character to terminate a
4632 `:first-' modifier, like csh.
4634 f. The incremental search code remembers the last search string and uses
4635 it if ^R^R is typed without a search string.
4637 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4638 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-release,
4639 and the previous version, bash-2.05-beta2.
4643 a. Make sure we note that the first line of a multi-line command was not
4644 saved in the history if the tests for HISTCONTROL succeed, but the
4645 HISTIGNORE check fails.
4647 b. Fixed a bug in the pattern matching code that caused `[' to be treated
4648 as a special character inside a `[...]' bracket expression.
4650 c. Fixed a bug in the pattern matching code that caused `]' to terminate
4651 a bracket expression even if it was the first character after the `['
4652 (or a leading `!' or `^').
4654 d. Made a small change to report a more user-friendly error message if
4655 execve(2) fails because of an error with the interpreter in a script
4656 with a leading `#! interpreter'.
4658 e. If the OS does not support an exec(2) magic number of `#!', make sure we
4659 have a non-null interpreter name before attempting to execute it.
4661 f. Fixed a bug that caused the shell process to end up in a different
4662 process group than the controlling terminal if a job-control shell was
4663 run with `exec' in the startup files.
4665 g. When started in POSIX mode, either by `bash --posix', `bash -o posix', or
4666 `sh', $SHELLOPTS includes `posix' and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4668 h. Fixed a problem that caused the `\W' prompt string escape sequence to
4669 expand to nothing when $PWD was `//'.
4671 i. The `bashbug' shell script no longer uses $(...) command substitution.
4673 j. When `set' is invoked without options in POSIX mode, it no longer prints
4674 the names and definitions of shell functions.
4676 2. Changes to Readline
4678 a. rl_set_paren_blink_timeout() is now documented.
4680 b. Corrected history.3 man page: `$' is not in the default value of
4681 history_word_delimiters.
4683 c. If a hook function assigned to rl_event_hook sets rl_done to a non-zero
4684 value, rl_read_key() now immediately returns '\n' (which is assumed to
4685 be bound to accept-line).
4687 3. New Features in Bash
4689 a. The `>&word' redirection now works in POSIX mode as it does by default,
4690 since POSIX.2 leaves it unspecified.
4692 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4693 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-beta2,
4694 and the previous version, bash-2.05-beta1.
4698 a. Fixed a bug in the arithmetic evaluation code so that a^=b is supported.
4700 b. Fixed startup so posixly_correct is retained across subshells begun to
4701 execute scripts without a leading `#!'.
4703 c. Fixed a bug that caused $(< file) to not work in a (...) subshell.
4705 d. Added config support for Linux running on the IBM S390.
4707 e. Fixed a bug that caused bash to get its input pointer out of sync when
4708 reading commands through a pipe and running a command with standard
4709 input redirected from a file.
4711 f. Made a change so that command completion now makes about half as many
4712 stat(2) calls when searching the $PATH.
4714 g. Fixed a bug that caused variable assignments preceding `return' to not
4715 be propagated to the shell environment in POSIX mode.
4717 h. Fixed a bug with ${parameter[:]?word} -- tilde expansion was not performed
4720 i. In POSIX mode, `break' and `continue' do not complain and return success
4721 if called when the shell is not executing a loop.
4723 j. Fixed `bash -o posix' to work the same as `bash --posix'.
4725 k. Fixed a bug where variable assignments preceding `eval' or `source/.'
4726 would not show up in the environment exported to subshells run by the
4729 l. In POSIX mode, shells started to execute command substitutions inherit
4730 the value of the `-e' option from their parent shell.
4732 m. In POSIX mode, aliases are expanded even in non-interactive shells.
4734 n. Changed some of the job control messages to display the text required by
4735 POSIX.2 when the shell is in POSIX mode.
4737 o. Fixed a bug in `test' that caused it to occasionally return incorrect
4738 results when non-numeric arguments were supplied to `-t'.
4740 2. Changes to Readline
4742 a. Some changes were made to avoid gcc warnings with -Wall.
4744 b. rl_get_keymap_by_name now finds keymaps case-insensitively, so
4745 `set keymap EMACS' works.
4747 c. The history file writing and truncation functions now return a useful
4750 d. Fixed a bug that could cause applications to dereference a NULL pointer
4751 if a NULL second argument was passed to history_expand().
4753 3. New Features in Bash
4755 a. doc/readline.3 has been moved to the readline distribution.
4757 4. New Features in Readline
4759 a. New function, rl_get_screen_size (int *rows, int *columns), returns
4760 readline's idea of the screen dimensions.
4762 b. The timeout in rl_gather_tyi (readline keyboard input polling function)
4763 is now settable via a function (rl_set_keyboard_input_timeout()).
4765 c. Renamed the max_input_history variable to history_max_entries; the old
4766 variable is maintained for backwards compatibility.
4768 d. The list of characters that separate words for the history tokenizer is
4769 now settable with a variable: history_word_delimiters. The default
4772 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4773 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-beta1,
4774 and the previous version, bash-2.05-alpha1.
4778 a. Changes to allow shared library and object building on the GNU Hurd.
4780 b. Fixes to the way exported functions are placed into the environment and
4783 c. The globbing library once again respects locales when processing ranges
4784 in bracket expressions while doing pattern matching.
4786 d. System-specific configuration changes for: Tru 64, Interix
4788 e. Bashbug now uses /usr/bin/editor as one of the editing alternatives, and
4789 will use mktemp(1) or tempfile(1), if present, for temporary file creation.
4791 f. Bash no longer performs a binary file check on a script argument that's
4792 really a tty (like /dev/fd/0 or /dev/stdin).
4794 g. Fixed a bug in the execution of shell scripts that caused the effects of
4795 $BASH_ENV to be undone in some cases.
4797 h. Fixed several bugs that made `bash [-i] /dev/stdin' not work correctly.
4799 i. Several changes to the job control code to avoid some signal state
4802 j. The Bash malloc no longer blocks signals as often, which should make it
4805 k. Fixed a parsing bug that did not allow backslash to escape a single quote
4806 inside a $'...' construct.
4808 l. Fixed a bug that caused things like ${var:=$'value'} to be parsed
4809 incorrectly. This showed up in newer versions of autoconf.
4811 m. Fixed a bug in the bash-specific readline initialization that caused
4812 key bindings to bash-specific function names appearing in .inputrc to
4815 n. Bash now sets the file descriptor it uses to save the file descriptor
4816 opened on a shell script to close on exec.
4818 o. Fixed a bug in the prompt string decoding that caused it to misbehave
4819 when presented an octal sequence of fewer than three characters.
4821 p. Fixed the `test' builtin to return an error if `[' is supplied a single
4822 argument that is not `]'.
4824 q. Fixed a bug that caused subshells started to run executable shell scripts
4825 without a leading `#!' to incorrectly inherit an argument list preceding
4826 a shell builtin (like such a script called from a script sourced with `.',
4827 where there were variable assignments preceding the `.' command)
4829 r. Fixed a bug that caused changes to variables supplied in an assignment
4830 statement preceding a shell builtin to not be honored (like a script
4833 s. HOSTTYPE, OSTYPE, and MACHTYPE are set only if they do not have values
4834 when the shell is started.
4836 t. Fixed a bug that caused SIGINT to kill shell scripts after the script
4839 u. The `fc' builtin now tries to create its temporary files in the directory
4842 v. Bash no longer calls any Readline functions or uses any Readline variables
4843 not declared in readline.h.
4845 w. Fixed a bug that caused some substitutions involving $@ to not be split
4846 correctly, especially expansions of the form ${paramterOPword}.
4848 x. SSH2_CLIENT is now treated like SSH_CLIENT and not auto-exported if it
4849 appears in the initial environment.
4851 y. Fixed a couple of problems with shell scripts without a leading `#!'
4852 being executed out of shell functions that could cause core dumps if
4853 such a script attempted to execute `return'.
4855 z. Fixed a problem with the `-nt' and `-ot' binary operators for the
4856 `test/[' builtin and the `[[' conditional command that caused wrong
4857 return values if one of the file arguments did not exist.
4859 aa. Fixed a bug that caused non-interactive shells which had previously
4860 executed `shopt -s expand_aliases' to fail to expand aliases in a
4861 command like `(command) &'.
4863 2. Changes to Readline
4865 a. Changes to make most (but not yet all -- there is still crlf()) of the
4866 exported readline functions declared in readline.h have an rl_ prefix.
4868 b. More `const' changes in function arguments, mostly for completion
4871 c. Fixed a bug in rl_forward that could cause the point to be set to before
4872 the beginning of the line in vi mode.
4874 d. Fixed a bug in the callback read-char interface to make it work when a
4875 readline function pushes some input onto the input stream with
4876 rl_execute_next (like the incremental search functions).
4878 e. Fixed a file descriptor leak in the history file manipulation code that
4879 was tripped when attempting to truncate a non-regular file (like
4882 f. Some existing variables are now documented and part of the public
4883 interface (declared in readline.h): rl_explict_arg, rl_numeric_arg,
4884 rl_editing_mode, rl_last_func.
4886 g. Renamed rltty_set_default_bindings to rl_tty_set_default_bindings and
4887 crlf to rl_crlf, so there are no public functions declared in readline.h
4888 without an `rl_' prefix. The old functions still exist for backwards
4891 3. New Features in Bash
4893 a. A new loadable builtin, realpath, which canonicalizes and expands symlinks
4894 in pathname arguments.
4896 b. When `set' is called without options, it prints function defintions in a
4897 way that allows them to be reused as input. This affects `declare' and
4898 `declare -p' as well.
4900 4. New Features in Readline
4902 a. New application-callable function rl_set_prompt(const char *prompt):
4903 expands its prompt string argument and sets rl_prompt to the result.
4905 b. New application-callable function rl_set_screen_size(int rows, int cols):
4906 public method for applications to set readline's idea of the screen
4909 c. The history example program (examples/histexamp.c) is now built as one
4912 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4913 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.05-alpha1,
4914 and the previous version, bash-2.04-release.
4918 a. A fix was made to allow newlines in compond array assignments.
4920 b. configure now checks for real-time signals with unusable values.
4922 c. Interactive shells no longer exit if a substitution fails because of an
4923 unset variable within a sourced file.
4925 d. Fixed a problem with incorrect matching of extended glob patterns when
4926 doing pattern substitution.
4928 e. `{' is now quoted by the completion code when it appears in a filename.
4930 f. Fixed an error in pattern matching that caused the matcher to not
4931 correctly skip the rest of a bracket expression after a character
4934 g. Fixed a bug in the IFS word splitting code to make a non-whitespace IFS
4935 character preceded by IFS whitespace part of the current delimiter rather
4936 than generating a separate field.
4938 h. The {!prefix@} expansion now generates separate words, analogous to $@,
4941 i. Command substitution now ignores NUL bytes in the command output, and the
4942 parser ignores them on input.
4944 j. A fix was made to the job control code to prevent hanging processes when
4945 the shell thinks background processes are running but the kernel returns
4946 -1/ECHILD from waitpid().
4948 k. `pwd' now prints an error message if the write fails when displaying the
4951 l. When in POSIX mode, the shell prints trap dispostions without a leading
4952 `SIG' in the signal specification.
4954 m. Fixed a parser bug that caused the current command's line count to be
4955 messed up by a compound array assignment.
4957 n. Fixed a bug in the unwind-protect code that caused bad behavior on machines
4958 where ints and pointers are not the same size.
4960 o. System-specific configure changes for: MacOS X.
4962 p. Changes for Cygwin to translate \r\n and \r to \n and to set file
4963 descriptors used for reading input to text mode in various places.
4965 q. Fixed a bug that caused `!' to occasionally not be honored when in
4968 r. Bash no longer assumes that getcwd() will return any useful error message
4969 in the buffer passed as an argument if the call fails.
4971 s. The `source', `.', and `fc' builtins no longer check whether a file is
4972 binary before reading commands from it.
4974 t. Subshells no longer turn off job control when they exit, since that
4975 sometimes resulted in the terminal being reset to the wrong process
4978 u. The history code no longer tries to save the second and subsequent lines
4979 of a multi-line command if the first line was not saved.
4981 v. The history saving code now does a better job of saving blank lines in a
4984 w. Removed a `feature' that made `ulimit' silently translate `unlimited' to
4985 the current hard limit, which obscured some kernel error returns.
4987 x. Fixed the grammar so that `}' is recognized as a reserved word after
4988 another reserved word, rather than requiring a `;' or newline. This
4989 means that constructs like
4991 { { echo a b c ; } }
4995 y. Conditional commands ([[...]]) now perform tilde expansion on their
4998 z. Noted in the documentation that `set -a' will cause functions to be
4999 exported if they are defined after `set -a' is executed.
5001 aa. When an interactive login shell starts, if $PWD and $HOME refer to the
5002 same directory but are not the same string, $PWD is set to $HOME.
5004 bb. Fixed `printf' to handle invalid floating point numbers better.
5006 cc. Temporary files are now created with random filenames, to improve security.
5008 dd. The readline initialization code now binds the custom bash functions and
5009 key bindings after the readline defaults are set up.
5011 ee. Fixed the `source' builtin to no longer overwrite a shell function's
5012 argument list, even if the sourced file changes the positional parameters.
5014 ff. A bug fix was made in the expansion of `$*' in contexts where it should
5015 not be split, like assignment statements.
5017 gg. Fixed a bug in the parameter substring expansion to handle conditional
5018 arithmetic expressions ( exp ? val1 : val2 ) without cutting the expression
5019 off at the wrong `:'.
5021 hh. The `<>' redirection is no longer subject to the current setting of
5022 `noclobber', as POSIX.2 specifies.
5024 ii. Fixed a bug in the conditional command parsing code that caused expressions
5025 in parentheses to occasionally be parsed incorrectly.
5027 jj. Fixed a bug in the ((...)) arithmetic command to allow do...done or
5028 {...} to follow the )) without an intervening list terminator.
5030 kk. `printf' now treats `\E' the same as `\e' when performing backslash escape
5031 expansion for the `%b' format specifier.
5033 ll. When in POSIX mode, the shell no longer searches the current directory for
5034 a file to be sourced with `.' or `source' if `.' is not in $PATH.
5036 mm. Interactive comments are no longer turned off when POSIX mode is disabled.
5038 nn. The UID, EUID, HOSTNAME variables are not set if they are in the shell's
5039 environment when it starts up.
5041 oo. Fixed a bug in the `command' builtin so the effect of a command like
5042 `command exec 4<file' is as if the `command' had been omitted.
5044 pp. ${foo[@]} and ${foo[*]} now work as in ksh93 if `foo' is not an array
5047 qq. ${#foo[X]}, where X is 0, @, or *, now work as in ksh93 if `foo' is not
5050 rr. The shell's idea of an absolute pathname now takes into account a
5051 possible drive specification on Cygwin and other Windows systems.
5053 ss. Fixed a bug which caused incorrect parsing of some multi-character
5054 constructs if they were split across input lines with backslash-newline
5057 tt. Fixed a bug that caused restricted shell mode to be set inappropriately
5058 when trying to execute a shell script without a leading `#!'.
5060 uu. Shell function definitions no longer require that the body be a group
5061 command ( {...} ), as POSIX.2 requires.
5063 vv. The `cd' and `pwd' builtins now process symlinks in pathnames internally
5064 and should require many fewer calls to getcwd().
5066 ww. Fixed a bug that caused a pipeline's process group to be set incorrectly
5067 if one of the pipeline elements contained a command substitution.
5069 xx. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when expanding the value of HISTIGNORE.
5071 yy. The output of `set' is now quoted using $'...' so invisible characters are
5072 displayed as escape sequences.
5074 zz. Fixed the help text for `unset', since PATH and IFS may both be unset.
5076 aaa. The shell no longer puts directory names into the command hash table.
5078 bbb. Fixed a bug in `read' that caused it to occasionally free memory twice if
5079 it was interrupted after reading a large amount of data.
5081 ccc. Assignment statements that attempt to assign values to readonly variables
5082 now cause the command to return an error status.
5084 ddd. Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect output if a $(<file) construct was
5087 eee. GROUPS and FUNCNAME now return an error status when assignment is
5088 attempted, but may be unset (in which case they lose their special
5089 properties). In all respects except unsetting, they are readonly.
5091 fff. The string-to-integer conversion code now ignores trailing whitespace in
5092 the string, even if strtol(3) does not.
5094 ggg. The tcsh magic-space function now does a better job of inserting the
5095 space close to where the point was before the history expansion, rather
5096 than just appending it.
5098 hhh. Fixed a bug which caused a file sourced from an interactive shell to
5099 fill up the jobs table if it ran lots of jobs.
5101 iii. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code to avoid infinite
5102 recursion on zero-length matches.
5104 2. Changes to Readline
5106 a. When setting the terminal attributes on systems using `struct termio',
5107 readline waits for output to drain before changing the attributes.
5109 b. A fix was made to the history word tokenization code to avoid attempts to
5110 dereference a null pointer.
5112 c. Readline now defaults rl_terminal_name to $TERM if the calling application
5113 has left it unset, and tries to initialize with the resultant value.
5115 d. Instead of calling (*rl_getc_function)() directly to get input in certain
5116 places, readline now calls rl_read_key() consistently.
5118 e. Fixed a bug in the completion code that allowed a backslash to quote a
5119 single quote inside a single-quoted string.
5121 f. rl_prompt is no longer assigned directly from the argument to readline(),
5122 but uses memory allocated by readline. This allows constant strings to
5123 be passed to readline without problems arising when the prompt processing
5124 code wants to modify the string.
5126 g. Fixed a bug that caused non-interactive history searches to return the
5127 wrong line when performing multiple searches backward for the same string.
5129 h. Many variables, function arguments, and function return values are now
5130 declared `const' where appropriate, to improve behavior when linking with
5133 i. The control character detection code now works better on systems where
5134 `char' is unsigned by default.
5136 j. The vi-mode numeric argument is now capped at 999999, just like emacs mode.
5138 k. The Function, CPFunction, CPPFunction, and VFunction typedefs have been
5139 replaced with a set of specific prototyped typedefs, though they are
5140 still in the readline header files for backwards compatibility.
5142 m. Nearly all of the (undocumented) internal global variables in the library
5143 now have an _rl_ prefix -- there were a number that did not, like
5144 screenheight, screenwidth, alphabetic, etc.
5146 n. The ding() convenience function has been renamed to rl_ding(), though the
5147 old function is still defined for backwards compatibility.
5149 o. The completion convenience functions filename_completion_function,
5150 username_completion_function, and completion_matches now have an rl_
5151 prefix, though the old names are still defined for backwards compatibility.
5153 p. The functions shared by readline and bash (linkage is satisfied from bash
5154 when compiling with bash, and internally otherwise) now have an sh_ prefix.
5156 q. Changed the shared library creation procedure on Linux and BSD/OS 4.x so
5157 that the `soname' contains only the major version number rather than the
5158 major and minor numbers.
5160 r. Fixed a redisplay bug that occurred when the prompt spanned more than one
5161 physical line and contained invisible characters.
5163 3. New Features in Bash
5165 a. Added a new `--init-file' invocation argument as a synonym for `--rcfile',
5166 per the new GNU coding standards.
5168 b. The /dev/tcp and /dev/udp redirections now accept service names as well as
5171 c. `complete' and `compgen' now take a `-o value' option, which controls some
5172 of the aspects of that compspec. Valid values are:
5174 default - perform bash default completion if programmable
5175 completion produces no matches
5176 dirnames - perform directory name completion if programmable
5177 completion produces no matches
5178 filenames - tell readline that the compspec produces filenames,
5179 so it can do things like append slashes to
5180 directory names and suppress trailing spaces
5182 4. New Features in Readline
5184 a. The blink timeout for paren matching is now settable by applications.
5186 b. _rl_executing_macro has been renamed to rl_executing_macro, which means
5187 it's now part of the public interface.
5189 c. Readline has a new variable, rl_readline_state, which is a bitmap that
5190 encapsulates the current state of the library; intended for use by
5191 callbacks and hook functions.
5193 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5194 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-release,
5195 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta5.
5199 a. Better compile-time and configure-time checks for the necessity of
5202 b. A bug was fixed in the expansion of "${@:-}" when there are positional
5205 c. A typo was fixed in the output of `complete'.
5207 d. The matches generated for a word by the `-W' argument to complete and
5208 compgen are now matched against the word being completed, and only
5209 matches are returned as the result.
5211 e. Some fixes were made for systems which do not restart read(2) when a
5212 signal caught by bash is received.
5214 f. A bug was fixed which caused the umask to be set to 0 when an invalid
5215 symbolic mode mask was parsed.
5217 g. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump if a SIGCHLD was received while
5218 performing an assignment statement using command substitution.
5220 h. Changed the word splitting function for programmable completion so cases
5221 in which the cursor is between words are handled a bit better.
5223 2. Changes to Readline
5225 a. rl_funmap_names() is now documented.
5227 3. New Features in Bash
5229 a. The LC_NUMERIC variable is now treated specially, and used to set the
5230 LC_NUMERIC locale category for number formatting, e.g., when `printf'
5231 displays floating-point numbers.
5233 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5234 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta5,
5235 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta4.
5239 a. A couple of changes were made to the Makefiles for easier building on
5242 b. Fixed a bug where the current prompt would be set to $PS2 at startup.
5244 c. The shell script that tests an already-installed version was changed to
5245 remove the directory it created its test programs in at exit.
5247 d. Several changes were made to the code that tokenizes an input line for
5248 the programmable completion code. Shell metacharacters will now appear
5249 as individual words in the word list passed to the completion functions.
5250 Some of the example completion shell functions were changed to understand
5251 redirection operators.
5253 e. A bug was fixed that, under obscure circumstances, could confuse the
5254 parser when a shell function was run by the programmable completion code.
5256 f. A bug was fixed in the ulimit builtin for systems not using getrlimit().
5258 g. The execution code now propagates the correct exit status back to the rest
5259 of the code if the return value of a subshell command was being inverted.
5260 Some new test cases for inverting return values with the `!' reserved
5261 word have been added.
5263 h. Negative exponents in the arithmetic evaluation of v**e now return an
5266 i. A bug that caused bash to check the wrong process in a pipeline for
5267 abnormal termination (and consequently resetting the terminal attributes)
5270 j. Fixed a bug that caused $PS2 to be displayed after PROMPT_COMMAND was
5273 2. Changes to Readline
5275 1. Fixed a bug in a C preprocessor define that caused the keypad control
5276 functions to be compiled out for all platforms except DJGPP.
5278 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5279 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta4,
5280 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta3.
5284 a. A couple of changes were made to the redirection to attempt to avoid
5285 race conditions and malicious file replacement.
5287 2. A change was made to the string evaluation code (used for command
5288 substitution, `eval', and the `.' builtin) to fix an obscure core
5289 dump on alpha machines.
5291 3. A bug that caused $LINENO to be wrong when executing arithmetic for
5294 4. A couple of memory leaks in the programmable completion code were fixed.
5296 5. A bug that could cause a core dump by freeing memory twice during a call
5297 to `eval' if `set -u' had been enabled and an undefined variable was
5298 referenced was fixed.
5300 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5301 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta3,
5302 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta2.
5306 a. Bash should run the appropriate startup files when invoked by ssh2.
5308 b. Fixed a bug in the parsing of conditional commands that could cause a
5311 c. Fixed a bug in parsing job specifications that occasionally caused
5312 core dumps when an out-of-range job was referenced.
5314 d. Fixed the `type' and `command' builtins to do better reporting of
5315 commands that are not found in $PATH or the hash table.
5317 e. Fixed a POSIX.2 compliance problem in the command builtin -- commands
5318 are supposed to be reported as full pathnames.
5320 f. The `echo' builtin now returns failure if a write error occurs.
5322 g. Fixed a bug which caused the locale to not be reset correctly when
5325 h. Changed description of `getopts' in man page and reference manual to make
5326 it clear that option characters may be characters other than letters.
5328 i. If the shell exits while in a function, make sure that any trap on EXIT
5329 doesn't think the function is still executing.
5331 j. Bashbug now tries harder to find a usable editor if $EDITOR is not set,
5332 rather than simply defaulting to `emacs'.
5334 k. Changes to the scripts that guess and canonicalize the system type, from
5335 the latest `automake' distribution via Debian.
5337 l. When using named pipes for process substitution, make sure the file
5338 descriptors opened for reading are set to non-blocking mode.
5340 m. Fixed a bug that caused termination of pipelines that are killed by a
5341 signal to not be reported in some cases.
5343 n. When not in literal-history mode, shell comment lines are not added to
5346 o. When running in POSIX.2 mode, bash no longer performs word splitting on
5347 the expanded value of the word supplied as the filename argument to
5348 redirection operators.
5350 p. The prompt string decoding code now backslash-quotes only characters that
5351 are special within double quotes when expanding the \w and \W escape
5354 q. Fixed a bug in the prompt decoding code that could cause a non-interactive
5355 shell to seg fault if `\u' was used in PS4 and the shell was in xtrace
5358 r. Fixed a bug that caused function definitions to be printed with any
5359 redirections that should be attached to the entire function before the
5362 s. Changed the tilde expansion code for Cygwin systems to avoid creating
5363 pathnames beginning with `//' if $HOME == `/'.
5365 t. Fixed a couple of autoconf tests to avoid creating files with fixed names
5368 u. The `trap' and `kill' builtins now know the names of the POSIX.1b real-
5369 time signals on systems which support them.
5371 2. Changes to Readline
5373 a. Fixed a problem with the single-quote quoting function that could cause
5376 b. Fixed a bug that caused incorrect `stat characters' to be printed if
5377 the files being completed were in the root directory and visible-stats
5380 3. New Features in Bash
5382 a. There is a new `rbash.1' manual page, from the Debian release.
5384 b. The `--enable-usg-echo-default' option to `configure' has been renamed to
5385 `--enable-xpg-echo-default'. The old option is still there for backwards
5388 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5389 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta2,
5390 and the previous version, bash-2.04-beta1.
5394 a. Fixed a bug that could cause pipes to be closed inappropriately in
5397 b. Fixed a bug that caused creation of the exported environment to clobber
5398 the current command string if there were any exported shell functions.
5400 c. Some changes were made to reduce bash's memory usage.
5402 d. Fixed a problem with programmable completion and filenames to be
5403 completed containing quote characters.
5405 e. Changed the code the removes named pipes created for the <(...) and >(...)
5406 expansions to defer removal until after any current shell function has
5409 f. Fixed a bug in `select' which caused it to not handle the `continue'
5412 g. Autoconf tests added for cygwin32 and mingw32.
5414 2. New Features in Bash
5416 a. The `--with-bash-malloc' configure option replaces `--with-gnu-malloc'
5417 (which is still there for backwards compatibility).
5419 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5420 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-beta1,
5421 and the previous version, bash-2.04-alpha1.
5425 a. Fixed a bug in the programmable completion code that occurred when
5426 trying to complete command lines containing a `;' or `@'.
5428 b. The file descriptor from which the shell is reading a script is now
5429 moved to a file descriptor above the user-addressible range.
5431 c. Changes to `printf' so that it can handle integers beginning with 0
5432 or 0x as octal and hex, respectively.
5434 d. Fixes to the programmable completion code so it handles nonsense like
5435 `compgen -C xyz' gracefully.
5437 e. The shell no longer modifies the signal handler for SIGPROF, allowing
5438 profiling again on certain systems.
5440 f. The shell checks for a new window size, if the user has requested it,
5441 after a process exits due to a signal.
5443 g. Fixed a bug with variables with null values in a program's temporary
5444 environment and the bash getenv() replacement.
5446 h. `declare' and the other builtins that take variable assignments as
5447 arguments now honor `set -a' and mark modified variables for export.
5449 i. Some changes were made for --dump-po-strings mode when writing strings
5450 with embedded newlines.
5452 j. The code that caches export strings from the initial environment now
5453 duplicates the string rather than just pointing into the environment.
5455 k. The filename completion quoting code now uses single quotes by default
5456 if the filename being completed contains newlines, since \<newline>
5457 has a special meaning to the parser.
5459 l. Bash now uses typedefs bits32_t and u_bits32_t instead of int32_t and
5460 u_int32_t, respectively to avoid conflicts on certain Unix versions.
5462 m. Configuration changes were made for: Rhapsody, Mac OS, FreeBSD-3.x.
5464 n. Fixed a problem with hostname-to-ip-address translation in the
5465 /dev/(tcp|udp)/hostname/port redirection code.
5467 o. The texinfo manual has been reorganized slightly.
5469 p. Filename generation (globbing) range comparisons in bracket expressions
5470 no longer use strcoll(3) even if it is available, since it has unwanted
5471 effects in certain locales.
5473 q. Fixed a cosmetic problem in the source that caused the shell to not
5474 compile if DPAREN_ARITHMETIC was not defined but ARITH_FOR_COMMAND was.
5476 r. Fixed a bug in the here-document code tripped when the file descriptor
5477 opened to the file containing the text of the here document was the
5478 same as a redirector specified by the user.
5480 s. Fixed a bug where the INVERT_RETURN flag was not being set for `pipeline'
5481 in `time ! pipeline'.
5483 t. Fixed a bug with the `wait' builtin which manifested itself when an
5484 interrupt was received while the shell was waiting for asynchronous
5485 processes in a shell script.
5487 u. Fixed the DEBUG trap code so that it has the correct value of $?.
5489 v. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code that could cause
5490 the shell to attempt to free unallocated memory if the pattern started
5491 with `/' and an expansion error occurs.
5493 w. Fixed a bug in the positional parameter substring code that could
5494 cause the shell to loop freeing freed memory.
5496 x. Fixed a bug in the positional parameter pattern substitution code so
5497 that it correctly handles null replacement strings with a pattern
5498 string prefixed with `%' or `#'.
5500 y. The shell no longer attempts to import functions from the environment if
5503 z. Fixed a bug that caused `return' in a command substitution executed in
5504 a shell function to return from the function in a subshell and continue
5507 aa. `hash -p /pathname/with/slashes name' is no longer allowed when the shell
5510 bb. The wait* job control functions now behave better if called when there
5511 are no unwaited-for children.
5513 cc. Command substitution no longer unconditionally disables job control in
5514 the subshell started to run the command.
5516 dd. A bug was fixed that occasionally caused traps to mess up the parser
5519 ee. `bashbug' now honors user headers in the mail message it sends.
5521 ff. A bug was fixed that caused the `:p' history modifier to not print the
5522 history expansion if the `histverify' option was set.
5524 2. Changes to Readline
5526 a. Fixed a bug in the redisplay code for lines with more than 256 line
5529 b. A bug was fixed which caused invisible character markers to not be
5530 stripped from the prompt string if the terminal was in no-echo mode.
5532 c. Readline no longer tries to get the variables it needs for redisplay
5533 from the termcap entry if the calling application has specified its
5534 own redisplay function. Readline treats the terminal as `dumb' in
5537 d. Fixes to the SIGWINCH code so that a multiple-line prompt with escape
5538 sequences is redrawn correctly.
5540 3. New Features in Bash
5542 a. `bashbug' now accepts `--help' and `--version' options.
5544 b. There is a new `xpg_echo' option to `shopt' that controls the behavior
5545 of echo with respect to backslash-escaped characters at runtime.
5547 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5548 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-alpha1,
5549 and the previous version, bash-2.04-devel.
5553 a. Fixed a bug that could cause core dumps when performing substring
5556 b. Shared object configuration changes for: Solaris, OSF/1
5558 c. The POSIX_GLOB_LIBRARY code that uses the POSIX.2 globbing facilities
5559 for pathname expansion now understands GLOBIGNORE.
5561 d. The code that implements `eval' was changed to save the value of the
5562 current prompt, so an eval in a shell function called by the programmable
5563 completion code will not change the prompt to $PS2.
5565 e. Restored the undocumented NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS #define to
5566 config-top.h. If this is defined, all login shells will read the
5567 startup files, not just interactive and non-interactive started with
5568 the `--login' option.
5570 f. Fixed a bug that caused the expansion code to occasionally dump core if
5571 IFS contained characters > 128.
5573 g. Fixed a problem with the grammar so that a newline is not required
5574 after the `))' in the new-style arithmetic for statement; a semicolon
5575 may be used as expected.
5577 h. Variable indirection may now reference the shell's special variables.
5579 i. The $'...' and $"..." constructs are now added to the history correctly
5580 if they contain newlines and command-oriented history is enabled.
5582 j. It is now an error to try to assign a value to a function-local copy
5583 of a readonly shell variable (declared with the `local' builtin).
5585 2. Changes to Readline
5587 a. The history file code now uses O_BINARY mode when reading and writing
5588 the history file on cygwin32.
5590 3. New Features in Bash
5592 a. A new programmable completion facility, with two new builtin commands:
5593 complete and compgen.
5595 b. configure has a new option, `--enable-progcomp', to compile in the
5596 programmable completion features (enabled by default).
5598 c. `shopt' has a new option, `progcomp', to enable and disable programmable
5599 completion at runtime.
5601 d. Unsetting HOSTFILE now clears the list of hostnames used for completion.
5603 4. New Features in Readline
5605 a. A new variable, rl_gnu_readline_p, always 1. The intent is that an
5606 application can verify whether or not it is linked with the `real'
5607 readline library or some substitute.
5609 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5610 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.04-devel,
5611 and the previous version, bash-2.03-release.
5615 a. System-specific configuration and source changes for: Interix, Rhapsody
5617 b. Fixed a bug in execute_cmd.c that resulted in a compile-time error if
5618 JOB_CONTROL was not defined.
5620 c. An obscure race condition in the trap code was fixed.
5622 d. The string resulting from $'...' is now requoted to avoid any further
5625 e. The $'...' quoting syntax now allows backslash to escape a single quote,
5626 for ksh-93 compatibility.
5628 f. The $"..." quoting syntax now escapes backslashes and double quotes in
5629 the translated string when displaying them with the --dump-po-strings
5632 g. `echo -e' no longer converts \' to '.
5634 h. Fixes were made to the extended globbing code to handle embedded (...)
5637 i. Some improvements were made to the code that unsets `nodelay' mode on
5638 the file descriptor from which bash is reading input.
5640 j. Some changes were made to the replacement termcap library for better
5641 operation on MS-DOS.
5643 k. Some changes were made to the tilde expansion code to handle backslash
5644 as a pathname separator on MS-DOS.
5646 l. The source has been reorganized a little bit -- there is now an `include'
5647 subdirectory, and lib/posixheaders has been removed.
5649 m. Improvements were made to the `read' builtin so that it makes many
5650 fewer read(2) system calls.
5652 n. The expansion of $- will include `c' and `s' when those options are
5653 supplied at shell invocation.
5655 o. Several improvments were made to the completion code: variable completion
5656 now works better when there are unterminated expansions, command
5657 completion understands quotes better, and completion now works in certain
5658 unclosed $(... constructs.
5660 p. The arithmetic expansion code was fixed to not need the value of a
5661 variable being assigned a value (fixes the "ss=09; let ss=10" bug).
5663 q. Some changes were made to make exported environment creation faster.
5665 r. The html documentation will be installed into $(htmldir) if that variable
5666 has a value when `make install' is run.
5668 s. Fixed a bug that would cause the bashrc file to be sourced inappropriately
5669 when bash is started by sshd.
5671 t. The SSH_CLIENT environment variable is no longer auto-exported.
5673 u. A bug that caused redirections with (...) subshells to be performed in
5674 the wrong order was fixed.
5676 v. A bug that occasionally caused inappropriate expansion of assignment
5677 statements in compound array assignments was fixed.
5679 w. The code that parses the words in a compound array assignment was
5680 simplified considerably and should work better now.
5682 x. Fixes to the non-job-control code in nojobs.c to make it POSIX.2-compliant
5683 when a user attempts to retrieve the status of a terminated background
5686 y. Fixes to the `printf' builtin so that it doesn't try to expand all
5687 backslash escape sequences in the format string before parsing it for
5688 % format specifiers.
5690 2. Changes to Readline
5692 a. The history library tries to truncate the history file only if it is a
5695 b. A bug that caused _rl_dispatch to address negative array indices on
5696 systems with signed chars was fixed.
5698 c. rl-yank-nth-arg now leaves the history position the same as when it was
5701 d. Changes to the completion code to handle MS-DOS drive-letter:pathname
5704 e. Completion is now case-insensitive by default on MS-DOS.
5706 f. Fixes to the history file manipulation code for MS-DOS.
5708 g. Readline attempts to bind the arrow keys to appropriate defaults on MS-DOS.
5710 h. Some fixes were made to the redisplay code for better operation on MS-DOS.
5712 i. The quoted-insert code will now insert tty special chars like ^C.
5714 j. A bug was fixed that caused the display code to reference memory before
5715 the start of the prompt string.
5717 k. More support for __EMX__ (OS/2).
5719 l. A bug was fixed in readline's signal handling that could cause infinite
5720 recursion in signal handlers.
5722 m. A bug was fixed that caused the point to be less than zero when rl_forward
5723 was given a very large numeric argument.
5725 n. The vi-mode code now gets characters via the application-settable value
5726 of rl_getc_function rather than calling rl_getc directly.
5728 3. New Features in Bash
5730 a. The history builtin has a `-d offset' option to delete the history entry
5731 at position `offset'.
5733 b. The prompt expansion code has two new escape sequences: \j, the number of
5734 active jobs; and \l, the basename of the shell's tty device name.
5736 c. The `bind' builtin has a new `-x' option to bind key sequences to shell
5739 d. There is a new shell option, no_empty_command_completion, which, when
5740 enabled, disables command completion when TAB is typed on an empty line.
5742 e. The `help' builtin has a `-s' option to just print a builtin's usage
5745 f. There are several new arithmetic operators: id++, id-- (variable
5746 post-increment/decrement), ++id, --id (variabl pre-increment/decrement),
5747 expr1 , expr2 (comma operator).
5749 g. There is a new ksh-93 style arithmetic for command:
5750 for ((expr1 ; expr2; expr3 )); do list; done
5752 h. The `read' builtin has a number of new options:
5753 -t timeout only wait timeout seconds for input
5754 -n nchars only read nchars from input instead of a full line
5755 -d delim read until delim rather than newline
5756 -s don't echo input chars as they are read
5758 i. The redirection code now handles several filenames specially:
5759 /dev/fd/N, /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr, whether or
5760 not they are present in the file system.
5762 j. The redirection code now recognizes pathnames of the form
5763 /dev/tcp/host/port and /dev/udp/host/port, and tries to open a socket
5764 of the appropriate type to the specified port on the specified host.
5766 k. The ksh-93 ${!prefix*} expansion, which expands to the names of all
5767 shell variables whose names start with prefix, has been implemented.
5769 l. There is a new dynamic variable, FUNCNAME, which expands to the name of
5770 a currently-executing function. Assignments to FUNCNAME have no effect.
5772 m. The GROUPS variable is no longer readonly; assignments to it are silently
5773 discarded. This means it can be unset.
5775 4. New Features in Readline
5777 a. Parentheses matching is now always compiled into readline, and enabled
5778 or disabled when the value of the `blink-matching-paren' variable is
5781 b. MS-DOS systems now use ~/_inputrc as the last-ditch inputrc filename.
5783 c. MS-DOS systems now use ~/_history as the default history file.
5785 d. history-search-{forward,backward} now leave the point at the end of the
5786 line when the string to search for is empty, like
5787 {reverse,forward}-search-history.
5789 e. history-search-{forward,backward} now leave the last history line found
5790 in the readline buffer if the second or subsequent search fails.
5792 f. New function for use by applications: rl_on_new_line_with_prompt, used
5793 when an application displays the prompt itself before calling readline().
5795 g. New variable for use by applications: rl_already_prompted. An application
5796 that displays the prompt itself before calling readline() must set this to
5799 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5800 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-release,
5801 and the previous version, bash-2.03-beta2.
5805 a. A file descriptor leak in the `fc' builtin was fixed.
5807 b. A bug was fixed in the `read' builtin that caused occasional spurious
5808 failures when using `read -e'.
5810 c. The version code needed to use the value of the cpp variable
5811 CONF_MACHTYPE rather than MACHTYPE.
5813 d. A new test was added to exercise the command printing and copying code.
5815 e. A bug was fixed that caused `time' to be recognized as a reserved word
5816 if it was the first pattern in a `case' statement pattern list.
5818 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5819 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-beta2,
5820 and the previous version, bash-2.03-beta1.
5824 a. Slight additions to support/shobj-conf, mostly for the benefit of AIX 4.2.
5826 b. config.{guess,sub} support added for the NEC SX4.
5828 c. Changed some of the cross-compiling sections of the configure macros in
5829 aclocal.m4 so that configure won't abort.
5831 d. Slight changes to how the HTML versions of the bash and readline manuals
5834 e. Fixed conditional command printing to avoid interpreting printf `%'-escapes
5837 f. Don't include the bash malloc on all variants of the alpha processor.
5839 g. Changes to configure to make --enable-profiling work on Solaris 2.x.
5841 h. Fixed a bug that manifested itself when shell functions were called
5842 between calls to `getopts'.
5844 i. Fixed pattern substitution so that a bare `#'as a pattern causes the
5845 replacement string to be prefixed to the search string, and a bare
5846 `%' causes the replacement string to be appended to the search string.
5848 j. Fixed a bug in the command execution code that caused child processes
5849 to occasionally have the wrong value for $!.
5851 2. Changes to Readline
5853 a. Added code to the history library to catch history substitutions using
5854 `&' without a previous history substitution or search having been
5857 3. New Features in Bash
5859 4. New Features in Readline
5861 a. New bindable variable: `isearch-terminators'.
5863 b. New bindable function: `forward-backward-delete-char' (unbound by default).
5865 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5866 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-beta1,
5867 and the previous version, bash-2.03-alpha.
5871 a. A change was made to the help text for `{...}' to make it clear that a
5872 semicolon is required before the closing brace.
5874 b. A fix was made to the `test' builtin so that syntax errors cause test
5875 to return an exit status > 1.
5877 c. Globbing is no longer performed on assignment statements that appear as
5878 arguments to `assignment builtins' such as `export'.
5880 d. System-specific configuration changes were made for: Rhapsody,
5881 AIX 4.2/gcc, BSD/OS 4.0.
5883 e. New loadable builtins: ln, unlink.
5885 f. Some fixes were made to the globbing code to handle extended glob patterns
5886 which immediately follow a `*'.
5888 g. A fix was made to the command printing code to ensure that redirections
5889 following compound commands have a space separating them from the rest
5892 h. The pathname canonicalization code was changed to produce fewer leading
5893 `//' sequences, since those are interpreted as network file system
5894 pathnames on some systems.
5896 i. A fix was made so that loops containing `eval' commands in commands passed
5897 to `bash -c' would not exit prematurely.
5899 j. Some changes were made to the job reaping code when the shell is not
5900 interactive, so the shell will retain exit statuses longer for examination
5903 k. A fix was made so that `jobs | command' works again.
5905 l. The erroneous compound array assignment var=((...)) is now a syntax error.
5907 m. A change was made to the dynamic loading code in `enable' to support
5910 n. A fix was made to the globbing code so that extended globbing patterns
5911 will correctly match `.' in a bracket expression.
5913 2. Changes to Readline
5915 a. A fix was made to the completion code in which a typo caused the wrong
5916 value to be passed to the function that computed the longest common
5917 prefix of the list of matches.
5919 b. The completion code now checks the value of rl_filename_completion_desired,
5920 which is set by application-supplied completion functions to indicate
5921 that filename completion is being performed, to decide whether or not to
5922 call an application-supplied `ignore completions' function.
5924 3. New Features in Bash
5926 a. A change was made to the startup file code so that any shell begun with
5927 the `--login' option, even non-interactive shells, will source the login
5928 shell startup files.
5930 4. New Features in Readline
5932 a. A new variable, rl_erase_empty_line, which, if set by an application using
5933 readline, will cause readline to erase, prompt and all, lines on which the
5934 only thing typed was a newline.
5936 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5937 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.03-alpha,
5938 and the previous version, bash-2.02.1-release.
5942 a. System-specific configuration changes were made for: Irix 6.x, Unixware 7.
5944 b. The texi2dvi and texi2html scripts were updated to the latest versions
5947 c. The configure tests that determine which native type is 32 bits were
5948 changed to not require a compiled program.
5950 d. Fixed a bug in shell_execve that could cause memory to be freed twice
5951 after a failed exec.
5953 e. The `printf' test uses `diff -a' if it's available to prevent confusion
5954 due to the non-ascii output.
5956 f. Shared object configuration is now performed by a shell script,
5957 support/shobj-conf, which generates values to be substituted into
5958 makefiles by configure.
5960 g. Some changes were made to `ulimit' to avoid the use of RLIM_INVALID as a
5963 h. Changes were made to `ulimit' to work around HPUX 9.x's peculiar
5964 handling of RLIMIT_FILESIZE.
5966 i. Some new loadable builtins were added: id, printenv, sync, whoami, push,
5967 mkdir. `pushd', `popd', and `dirs' can now be built as regular or
5968 loadable builtins from the same source file.
5970 j. Changes were made to `printf' to handle NUL bytes in the expanded format
5973 k. The various `make clean' Makefile targets now descend into lib/sh.
5975 l. The `type' builtin was changed to use the internal `getopt' so that things
5976 like `type -ap' work as expected.
5978 m. There is a new configuration option, --with-installed-readline, to link
5979 bash with a locally-installed version of readline. Only readline version
5980 4.0 and later releases can support this. Shared and static libraries
5981 are supported. The installed include files are used.
5983 n. There is a new autoconf macro used to find which basic type is 64 bits.
5985 o. Dynamic linking and loadable builtins should now work on SCO 3.2v5*,
5986 AIX 4.2 with gcc, Unixware 7, and many other systems using gcc, where
5987 the `-shared' options works correctly.
5989 p. A bug was fixed in the bash filename completion code that caused memory to
5990 be freed twice if a directory name containing an unset variable was
5991 completed and the -u option was set.
5993 q. The prompt expansion code now quotes the `$' in the `\$' expansion so it
5994 is not processed by subsequent parameter expansion.
5996 r. Fixed a parsing bug that caused a single or double quote after a `$$' to
5997 trigger ANSI C expansion or locale translation.
5999 s. Fixed a bug in the globbing code that caused quoted filenames containing
6000 no globbing characters to sometimes be incorrectly expanded.
6002 t. Changes to the default prompt strings if prompt string decoding is not
6003 compiled into the shell.
6005 u. Added `do', `then', `else', `{', and `(' to the list of keywords that may
6006 precede the `time' reserved word.
6008 v. The shell may now be cross-built for BeOS as well as cygwin32.
6010 w. The conditional command execution code now treats `=' the same as `=='
6011 for deciding when to perform pattern matching.
6013 x. The `-e' option no longer causes the shell to exit if a command exits
6014 with a non-zero status while running the startup files.
6016 y. The `printf' builtin no longer dumps core if a modifier is supplied in
6017 the format string without a conversion character (e.g. `%h').
6019 z. Array assignments of the form a=(...) no longer show up in the history
6022 aa. The parser was fixed to obey the POSIX.2 rules for finding the closing
6023 `}' in a ${...} expression.
6025 bb. The history file is now opened with mode 0600 rather than 0666, so bash
6026 no longer relies on the user's umask being set appropriately.
6028 cc. Setting LANG no longer causes LC_ALL to be assigned a value; bash now
6029 relies on proper behavior from the C library.
6031 dd. Minor changes were made to allow quoted variable expansions using
6032 ${...} to be completed correctly if there is no closing `"'.
6034 ee. Changes were made to builtins/Makefile.in so that configuring the shell
6035 with `--enable-profiling' works right and builtins/mkbuiltins is
6038 2. Changes to Readline
6040 a. The version number is now 4.0.
6042 b. There is no longer any #ifdef SHELL code in the source files.
6044 c. Some changes were made to the key binding code to fix memory leaks and
6045 better support Win32 systems.
6047 d. Fixed a silly typo in the paren matching code -- it's microseconds, not
6050 e. The readline library should be compilable by C++ compilers.
6052 f. The readline.h public header file now includes function prototypes for
6053 all readline functions, and some changes were made to fix errors in the
6054 source files uncovered by the use of prototypes.
6056 g. The maximum numeric argument is now clamped at 1000000.
6058 h. Fixes to rl_yank_last_arg to make it behave better.
6060 i. Fixed a bug in the display code that caused core dumps if the prompt
6061 string length exceeded 1024 characters.
6063 j. The menu completion code was fixed to properly insert a single completion
6064 if there is only one match.
6066 k. A bug was fixed that caused the display code to improperly display tabs
6069 3. New Features in Bash
6071 a. New `shopt' option, `restricted_shell', indicating whether or not the
6072 shell was started in restricted mode, for use in startup files.
6074 b. Filename generation is now performed on the words between ( and ) in
6075 array assignments (which it probably should have done all along).
6077 c. OLDPWD is now auto-exported, as POSIX.2 seems to require.
6079 d. ENV and BASH_ENV are read-only variables in a restricted shell.
6081 4. New Features in Readline
6083 a. Many changes to the signal handling:
6084 o Readline now catches SIGQUIT and cleans up the tty before returning;
6085 o A new variable, rl_catch_signals, is available to application writers
6086 to indicate to readline whether or not it should install its own
6087 signal handlers for SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT, SIGALRM, SIGTSTP,
6088 SIGTTIN, and SIGTTOU;
6089 o A new variable, rl_catch_sigwinch, is available to application
6090 writers to indicate to readline whether or not it should install its
6091 own signal handler for SIGWINCH, which will chain to the calling
6092 applications's SIGWINCH handler, if one is installed;
6093 o There is a new function, rl_free_line_state, for application signal
6094 handlers to call to free up the state associated with the current
6095 line after receiving a signal;
6096 o There is a new function, rl_cleanup_after_signal, to clean up the
6097 display and terminal state after receiving a signal;
6098 o There is a new function, rl_reset_after_signal, to reinitialize the
6099 terminal and display state after an application signal handler
6100 returns and readline continues
6102 b. There is a new function, rl_resize_terminal, to reset readline's idea of
6103 the screen size after a SIGWINCH.
6105 c. New public functions: rl_save_prompt and rl_restore_prompt. These were
6106 previously private functions with a `_' prefix.
6108 d. New function hook: rl_pre_input_hook, called just before readline starts
6109 reading input, after initialization.
6111 e. New function hook: rl_display_matches_hook, called when readline would
6112 display the list of completion matches. The new function
6113 rl_display_match_list is what readline uses internally, and is available
6114 for use by application functions called via this hook.
6116 f. New bindable function, delete-char-or-list, like tcsh.
6118 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6119 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02.1-release,
6120 and the previous version, bash-2.02-release.
6124 a. A bug that caused the bash readline support to not compile unless aliases
6125 and csh-style history were configured into the shell was fixed.
6127 b. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when here documents contained
6128 more than 1000 characters.
6130 c. Fixed a bug that caused a CDPATH entry of "" to not be treated the same
6131 as the current directory when in POSIX mode.
6133 d. Fixed an alignment problem with the memory returned by the bash malloc,
6134 so returned memory is now 64-bit aligned.
6136 e. Fixed a bug that caused command substitutions executed within pipelines
6137 to put the terminal in the wrong process group.
6139 f. Fixes to support/config.sub for: alphas, SCO Open Server and Open Desktop,
6140 Unixware 2, and Unixware 7.
6142 g. Fixes to the pattern matching code to make it work correctly for eight-bit
6145 h. Fixed a problem that occasionally caused the shell to display the wrong
6146 value for the new working directory when changing to a directory found
6147 in $CDPATH when in physical mode.
6149 i. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when using conditional commands in
6152 j. Fixed a bug that caused the printf builtin to loop forever if the format
6153 string did not consume any of the arguments.
6155 k. Fixed a bug in the parameter expansion code that caused "$@" to be
6156 incorrectly split if $IFS did not contain a space character.
6158 l. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when completing hostnames if
6159 the number of matching hostnames was an exact multiple of 16.
6161 m. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to fork too early when a command
6162 such as `%2 &' was given.
6164 2. Changes to Readline
6166 a. Fixed a problem with redisplay that showed up when the prompt string was
6167 longer than the screen width and the prompt contained invisible characters.
6169 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6170 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-release,
6171 and the previous version, bash-2.02-beta2.
6175 a. A bug was fixed that caused the terminal process group to be set
6176 incorrectly when performing command substitution of builtins in a
6179 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6180 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-beta2,
6181 and the previous version, bash-2.02-beta1.
6185 a. Attempting to `wait' for stopped jobs now generates a warning message.
6187 b. Pipelines which exit due to SIGPIPE in non-interactive shells are now
6188 not reported if the shell is compiled -DDONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE.
6190 c. Some changes were made to builtins/psize.sh and support/bashbug.sh to
6191 attempt to avoid some /tmp file races and surreptitious file
6194 d. Fixed a bug that caused the shell not to compile if configured with
6195 dparen arithmetic but without aliases.
6197 e. Fixed a bug that caused the input stream to be switched when assigning
6198 empty arrays with `bash -c'.
6200 f. A bug was fixed in the readline expansion glue code that caused bash to
6201 dump core when expanding lines with an unclosed single quote.
6203 g. A fix was made to the `cd' builtin so that using a non-empty directory
6204 from $CDPATH results in an absolute pathname of the new current working
6205 directory to be displayed after the current directory is changed.
6207 h. Fixed a bug in the variable assignment code that caused the shell to
6208 dump core when referencing an unset variable with `set -u' enabled in
6209 an assignment statement preceding a command.
6211 i. Fixed a bug in the exit trap code that caused reserved words to not be
6212 recognized under certain circumstances.
6214 j. Fixed a bug in the parameter pattern substitution code so that quote
6215 removal is performed.
6217 k. The shell should now configure correctly on Apple Rhapsody systems.
6219 l. The `kill' builtin now prints a usage message if it is not passed any
6222 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6223 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-beta1,
6224 and the previous version, bash-2.02-alpha1.
6228 a. A few compilation bugs were fixed in the new extended globbing code.
6230 b. Executing arithmetic commands now sets the command name to `((' so
6231 error messages look right.
6233 c. Fixed some build problems with various configuration options.
6235 d. The `printf' builtin now aborts immediately if an illegal format
6236 character is encountered.
6238 e. The code that creates here-documents now behaves better if the file it's
6239 trying to create already exists for some reason.
6241 f. Fixed a problem with the extended globbing code that made patterns like
6242 `x+*' expand incorrectly.
6244 g. The prompt string expansion code no longer quotes tildes with backslashes.
6246 h. The bash getcwd() implementation in lib/sh/getcwd.c now behaves better in
6247 the presence of lstat(2) failures.
6249 i. Fixed a bug with strsub() that caused core dumps when executing `fc -s'.
6251 j. The mail checking code now ensures that it has a valid default mailpath.
6253 k. A bug was fixed that caused local variables to be unset inappropriately
6254 when sourcing a script from within another sourced script.
6256 l. A bug was fixed in the history saving code so that functions are saved
6257 in the history list correctly if `cmdhist' is enabled, but `lithist'
6260 m. A bug was fixed that caused printf overflows when displaying error
6263 n. It should be easier to build the loadble builtins in examples/loadables,
6264 though some manual editing of the generated Makefile is still required.
6266 o. The user's primary group is now always ${GROUPS[0]}.
6268 p. Some updates were made to support/config.guess from the GNU master copy.
6270 q. Some changes were made to the autoconf support for Solaris 2.6 large
6273 r. The `command' builtins now does the right thing when confstr(3) cannot
6274 find a value for _CS_PATH.
6276 s. Extended globbing expressions like `*.!(c)' are not history expanded if
6277 `extglob' is enabled.
6279 t. Using the `-P' option to `cd' will force the value that is assigned to
6280 PWD to not contain any symbolic links.
6282 2. Changes to Readline
6284 a. The code that prints completion listings now behaves better if one or
6285 more of the filenames contains non-printable characters.
6287 b. The time delay when showing matching parentheses is now 0.5 seconds.
6289 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6290 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.02-alpha1,
6291 and the previous version, bash-2.01.1-release.
6295 a. OS-specific configuration changes for: BSD/OS 3.x, Minix 2.x,
6296 Solaris 2.6, SINIX SVR4.
6298 b. Changes were made to the generated `info' files so that `install-info'
6301 c. PWD is now auto-exported.
6303 d. A fix was made to the pipeline code to make sure that the shell forks
6304 to execute simple commands consisting solely of assignment statements.
6306 e. Changes to the test suite for systems with 14-character filenames.
6308 f. The default sizes of some internal hash tables have been made smaller
6309 to reduce the shell's memory footprint.
6311 g. The `((...))' arithmetic command is now executed directly instead of
6312 being translated into `let "..."'.
6314 h. Fixes were made to the expansion code so that "$*", "$@", "${array[@]}",
6315 and "${array[@]}" expand correctly when IFS does not contain a space
6316 character, is unset, or is set to NULL.
6318 i. The indirect expansion code (${!var}) was changed so that the only
6319 valid values of `var' are variable names, positional parameters, `#',
6322 j. An arithmetic expression error in a $((...)) expansion now causes a
6323 non-interactive shell running in posix mode to exit.
6325 k. Compound array assignment now splits the words within the parentheses
6326 on shell metacharacters like the parser would before expansing them
6327 and performing the assignment. This is for compatibility with ksh-93.
6329 l. The internal shell backslash-quoting code (used in the output of `set'
6330 and completion) now quotes tildes if they appear at the start of the
6331 string or after a `=' or `:'.
6333 m. A couple of bugs with `shopt -o' were fixed.
6335 n. `bash +o' now displays the same output as `set +o' before starting an
6338 o. A bug that caused command substitution and the `eval' builtin to
6339 occasionally free memory twice when an error was encountered was fixed.
6341 p. The filename globbing code no longer requires read permission for a
6342 directory when the filename to be matched does not contain any globbing
6343 characters, as POSIX.2 specifies.
6345 q. A bug was fixed so that the job containing the last asynchronous
6346 process is not removed from the job table until a `wait' is executed
6347 for that process or another asynchronous process is started. This
6348 satisfies a POSIX.2 requirement.
6350 r. A `select' bug was fixed so that a non-numeric user response is treated
6351 the same as a numeric response that is out of range.
6353 s. The shell no longer parses the value of SHELLOPTS from the environment
6354 if it is restricted, running setuid, or running in `privileged mode'.
6356 t. Fixes were made to enable large file support on systems such as
6357 Solaris 2.6, where the size of a file may be larger than can be held
6360 u. The filename hashing code was fixed to not add `./' to the beginning of
6361 filenames which already begin with `./'.
6363 v. The configure script was changed so that the GNU termcap library is not
6364 compiled in if `prefer-curses' has been specified.
6366 w. HISTCONTROL and HISTIGNORE are no longer applied to the second and
6367 subsequent lines of a multi-line command.
6369 x. A fix was made to `disown' so that it does a better job of catching
6372 y. Non-interactive shells no longer report the status of processes terminated
6373 due to SIGINT, even if the standard output is a terminal.
6375 z. A bug that caused the output of `jobs' to have extra carriage returns
6378 aa. A bug that caused PIPESTATUS to not be set when builtins or shell
6379 functions were executed in the foreground was fixed.
6381 bb. Bash now attempts to detect when it is being run by sshd, and treats
6382 that case identically to being run by rshd.
6384 cc. A bug that caused `set -a' to export SHELLOPTS when one of the shell
6385 options was changed was fixed.
6387 dd. The `kill' builtin now disallows empty or missing process id arguments
6388 instead of treating them as identical to `0', which means the current
6391 ee. `var=value declare -x var' now behaves identically to
6392 `var=value export var'. Similarly for `var=value declare -r var' and
6393 `var=value readonly var'.
6395 ff. A few memory leaks were fixed.
6397 gg. `alias' and `unalias' now print error messages when passed an argument
6398 that is not an alias for printing or deletion, even when the shell is
6399 not interactive, as POSIX.2 specifies.
6401 hh. `alias' and `alias -p' now return a status of 0 when no aliases are
6402 defined, as POSIX.2 specifes.
6404 ii. `cd -' now prints the pathname of the new working directory if the shell
6407 jj. A fix was made so that the code that binds $PWD now copes with getcwd()
6410 kk. `unset' now checks whether or not a function name it's trying to unset
6411 is a valid shell identifier only when the shell is running in posix mode.
6413 ll. A change was made to the code that generates filenames for here documents
6414 to make them less prone to name collisions.
6416 mm. The parser was changed so that `time' is recognized as a reserved word
6417 only at the beginning of a pipeline.
6419 nn. The pathname canonicalization code was changed so that `//' is converted
6420 into `/', but all other pathnames beginning with `//' are left alone, as
6423 oo. The `logout' builtin will no longer exit a non-interactive non-login
6426 2. Changes to Readline
6428 a. Fixed a problem in the readline test program rltest.c that caused a core
6431 b. The code that handles parser directives in inputrc files now displays
6432 more error messages.
6434 c. The history expansion code was fixed so that the appearance of the
6435 history comment character at the beginning of a word inhibits history
6436 expansion for that word and the rest of the input line.
6438 3. New Features in Bash
6440 a. A new version of malloc, based on the older GNU malloc, that has many
6441 changes, is more page-based, is more conservative with memory usage,
6442 and does not `orphan' large blocks when they are freed.
6444 b. A new version of gmalloc, based on the old GLIBC malloc, with many
6445 changes and range checking included by default.
6447 c. A new implementation of fnmatch(3) that includes full POSIX.2 Basic
6448 Regular Expression matching, including character classes, collating
6449 symbols, equivalence classes, and support for case-insensitive pattern
6452 d. ksh-88 egrep-style extended pattern matching ([@+*?!](patlist)) has been
6453 implemented, controlled by a new `shopt' option, `extglob'.
6455 e. There is a new ksh-like `[[' compound command, which implements
6456 extended `test' functionality.
6458 f. There is a new `printf' builtin, implemented according to the POSIX.2
6461 g. There is a new feature for command substitution: $(< filename) now expands
6462 to the contents of `filename', with any trailing newlines removed
6463 (equivalent to $(cat filename)).
6465 h. There are new tilde prefixes which expand to directories from the
6468 i. There is a new `**' arithmetic operator to do exponentiation.
6470 j. There are new configuration options to control how bash is linked:
6471 `--enable-profiling', to allow bash to be profiled with gprof, and
6472 `--enable-static-link', to allow bash to be linked statically.
6474 k. There is a new configuration option, `--enable-cond-command', which
6475 controls whether or not the `[[' command is included. It is on by
6478 l. There is a new configuration option, `--enable-extended-glob', which
6479 controls whether or not the ksh extended globbing feature is included.
6480 It is enabled by default.
6482 m. There is a new configuration #define in config.h.top that, when enabled,
6483 will cause all login shells to source /etc/profile and one of the user-
6484 specific login shell startup files, whether or not the shell is
6487 n. There is a new invocation option, `--dump-po-strings', to dump
6488 a shell script's translatable strings ($"...") in GNU `po' format.
6490 o. There is a new `shopt' option, `nocaseglob', to enable case-insensitive
6491 pattern matching when globbing filenames and using the `case' construct.
6493 p. There is a new `shopt' option, `huponexit', which, when enabled, causes
6494 the shell to send SIGHUP to all jobs when an interactive login shell
6497 q. `bind' has a new `-u' option, which takes a readline function name as an
6498 argument and unbinds all key sequences bound to that function in a
6501 r. `disown' now has `-a' and `-r' options, to limit operation to all jobs
6502 and running jobs, respectively.
6504 s. The `shopt' `-p' option now causes output to be displayed in a reusable
6507 t. `test' has a new `-N' option, which returns true if the filename argument
6508 has been modified since it was last accessed.
6510 u. `umask' now has a `-p' option to print output in a reusable format.
6512 v. A new escape sequence, `\xNNN', has been added to the `echo -e' and $'...'
6513 translation code. It expands to the character whose ascii code is NNN
6516 w. The prompt string expansion code has a new `\r' escape sequence.
6518 x. The shell may now be cross-compiled for the CYGWIN32 environment on
6521 4. New Features in Readline
6523 a. There is now an option for `iterative' yank-last-arg handline, so a user
6524 can keep entering `M-.', yanking the last argument of successive history
6527 b. New variable, `print-completions-horizontally', which causes completion
6528 matches to be displayed across the screen (like `ls -x') rather than up
6529 and down the screen (like `ls').
6531 c. New variable, `completion-ignore-case', which causes filename completion
6532 and matching to be performed case-insensitively.
6534 d. There is a new bindable command, `magic-space', which causes history
6535 expansion to be performed on the current readline buffer and a space to
6536 be inserted into the result.
6538 e. There is a new bindable command, `menu-complete', which enables tcsh-like
6539 menu completion (successive executions of menu-complete insert a single
6540 completion match, cycling through the list of possible completions).
6542 f. There is a new bindable command, `paste-from-clipboard', for use on Win32
6543 systems, to insert the text from the Win32 clipboard into the editing
6546 g. The key sequence translation code now understands printf-style backslash
6547 escape sequences, including \NNN octal escapes. These escape sequences
6548 may be used in key sequence definitions or macro values.
6550 h. An `$include' inputrc file parser directive has been added.
6552 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6553 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01.1-release,
6554 and the previous version, bash-2.01-release.
6558 a. The select command was fixed to check the validity of the user's
6559 input more strenuously.
6561 b. A bug was fixed that prevented `time' from timing commands correctly
6562 when supplied as an argument to `bash -c'.
6564 c. A fix was made to the mail checking code to keep from adding the same
6565 mail file to the list of files to check multiple times when parsing
6568 d. Fixed an off-by-one error in the tilde expansion library.
6570 e. When using the compound array assignment syntax, the old value of
6571 the array is cleared before assigning the new value.
6573 f. Fixed a bug that could cause a core dump when a trap handler was reset
6574 to the default in the trap command associated with that signal.
6576 g. Fixed a bug in the locale code that occurred when assigning a value
6579 h. A change was made to the parser so that words of the form xxx=(...)
6580 are not considered compound assignment statements unless there are
6581 characters before the `='.
6583 i. A fix was made to the command tracing code to correctly quote each
6586 j. Some changes were made to the bash-specific autoconf tests to make them
6589 k. Completion of words with globbing characters now correctly quotes the
6592 l. The directory /var/spool/mail is now preferred to /usr/spool/mail when
6593 configure is deciding on the default mail directory.
6595 m. The brace completion code was fixed to not quote the `{' and `}'.
6597 n. Some fixes were made to make $RANDOM more random in subshells.
6599 o. System-specific changes were made to configure for: SVR4.2
6601 p. Changes were made so that completion of words containing globbing chars
6602 substitutes the result only if a single filename was matched.
6604 q. The window size is now recomputed after a job is stopped with SIGTSTP if
6605 the user has set `checkwinsize' with `shopt'.
6607 r. When doing substring expansion, out-of-range substring specifiers now
6608 cause nothing to be substituted rather than an expansion error.
6610 s. A fix was made so that you can no longer trap `SIGEXIT' or `SIGDEBUG' --
6611 only `EXIT' and `DEBUG' are accepted.
6613 t. The display of trapped signals now uses the signal number if signals
6614 for which bash does not know the name are trapped.
6616 u. A fix was made so that `bash -r' does not turn on restricted mode until
6617 after the startup files are executed.
6619 v. A bug was fixed that occasionally caused a core dump when a variable
6620 found in the temporary environment of export/declare/readonly had a
6623 w. A bug that occasionally caused unallocated memory to be passed to free()
6624 when doing arithmetic substitution was fixed.
6626 x. A bug that caused a buffer overrun when expanding a prompt string
6627 containing `\w' and ${#PWD} exceeded PATH_MAX was fixed.
6629 y. A problem with the completion code that occasionally caused it to
6630 refer to a character before the beginning of the readline line buffer
6633 z. A bug was fixed so that the `read' builtin restarts reads when
6634 interrupted by signals other than SIGINT.
6636 aa. Fixed a bug that caused a command to be freed twice when there was
6637 an evaluation error in the `eval' command.
6639 2. Changes to Readline
6641 a. Added a missing `extern' to a declaration in readline.h that kept
6642 readline from compiling cleanly on some systems.
6644 b. The history file is now opened with mode 0600 when it is written for
6647 c. Changes were made to the SIGWINCH handling code so that prompt redisplay
6650 d. ^G now interrupts incremental searches correctly.
6652 e. A bug that caused a core dump when the set of characters to be quoted
6653 when completing words was empty was fixed.
6655 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6656 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-release,
6657 and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta2.
6661 a. The `distclean' target should remove the `printenv' executable if it
6664 b. The test suite was changed slightly to ensure that the error messages
6665 are printed in English.
6667 c. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when a filename containing a
6668 `/' was passed to `hash' was fixed.
6670 d. Pathname canonicalization now leaves a leading `//' intact, as POSIX.1
6673 e. A memory leak when completing commands was fixed.
6675 f. A memory leak that occurred when checking the hash table for commands
6676 with relative paths was fixed.
6678 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6679 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta2,
6680 and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta1.
6684 a. The `ulimit' builtin translates RLIM_INFINITY to the hard limit only if
6685 the current (soft) limit is less than or equal to the hard limit.
6687 b. Fixed a bug that caused the bash emulation of strcasecmp to produce
6690 c. A bug that caused memory to be freed twice when a trap handler resets
6691 the trap more than once was fixed.
6693 d. A bug that caused machines where sizeof (pointer) > sizeof (int) to
6694 fail (and possibly dump core) when trying to unwind-protect a null
6697 e. The startup files should not be run with job control enabled. This fix
6698 allows SIGINT to once again interrupt startup file execution.
6700 f. Bash should not change the SIGPROF handler if it is set to something
6703 g. The completion code that provides bash-specific completions for readline
6704 now quotes characters that the readline code would treat as word break
6705 characters if they appear in a file name.
6707 h. The completion code now correctly quotes filenames containing a `!',
6708 even if the user attempted to use double quotes when attempting
6711 i. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `disown' was called without
6712 arguments and there was no current job was fixed.
6714 j. A construct like $((foo);bar) is now processed as a command substitution
6715 rather than as a bad arithmetic substitution.
6717 k. A couple of bugs that caused `fc' to not obey the `cmdhist' and `lithist'
6718 shell options when editing and re-executing a series of commands were
6721 l. A fix was made to the grammar -- the list of commands between `do' and
6722 `done' in the body of a `for' command should be treated the same as a
6725 2. Changes to Readline
6727 a. A couple of bugs that caused the history search functions to attempt to
6728 free a NULL pointer were fixed.
6730 b. If the C library provides setlocale(3), readline does not need to look
6731 at various environment variables to decide whether or not to go into
6732 eight-bit mode automatically -- just check whether the current locale
6733 is not `C' or `POSIX'.
6735 c. If the filename completion function finds that a directory was not closed
6736 by a previous (interrupted) completion, it closes the directory with
6739 3. New Features in Bash
6741 a. New bindable readline commands: history-and-alias-expand-line and
6742 alias-expand-line. The code was always in there, there was just no
6745 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6746 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta1,
6747 and the previous version, bash-2.01-alpha1.
6751 a. Fixed a problem that could cause file descriptors used for process
6752 substitution to conflict with those used explicitly in redirections.
6754 b. Made it easier to regenerate configure if the user changes configure.in.
6756 c. ${GROUPS[0]} should always be the primary group, even on systems without
6759 d. Spelling correction is no longer enabled by default.
6761 e. Fixes to quoting problems in `bashbug'.
6763 f. OS-specific configuration changes were made for: Irix 6.
6765 g. OS-specific code changes were made for: QNX.
6767 h. A more meaningful message is now printed when the file in /tmp for a
6768 here document cannot be created.
6770 i. Many changes to the shell's variable initialization code to speed
6771 non-interactive startup.
6773 j. Changes to the non-job-control code so that it does not try to open
6776 k. The output of `set' and `export' is once again sorted, as POSIX wants.
6778 l. Fixed a problem caused by a recursive call reparsing the value of
6781 m. The tilde code no longer calls getenv() when it's compiled as part of
6782 the shell, which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot
6783 redefine getenv(), like the NeXT OS.
6785 n. Fixed a problem that caused `bash -o' or `bash +o' to not list all
6788 o. Fixed `ulimit' to convert RLIM_INFINITY to the appropriate hard limit
6789 only if the hard limit is greater than the current (soft) limit.
6791 p. Fixed a problem that arose when building bash in a different directory
6792 than the source and y.tab.[ch] were remade with something other than
6793 bison. This came up most often on NetBSD.
6795 q. Fixed a problem with completion -- it thought that `pwd`/[TAB] indicated
6796 an unfinished command completion (`/), which generated errors.
6798 r. The bash special tilde expansions (~-, ~+) are now attempted before
6799 calling the standard tilde expansion code, which should eliminate the
6800 problems people have been seeing with this on Solaris 2.5.1.
6802 s. Added support for <stdarg.h> to places where it was missing.
6804 t. Changed the code that reads the output of a command substitution to not
6805 go through stdio. This reduces the memory requirements and is faster.
6807 u. A number of changes to speed up export environment creation were made.
6809 v. A number of memory leaks were fixed as the result of running the test
6810 scripts through Purify.
6812 w. Fixed a bug that caused subshells forked to interpret executable
6813 scripts without a leading `#!' to not reinitialize the values of
6816 2. Changes to Readline
6818 a. History library has less `#ifdef SHELL' code -- abstracted stuff out
6819 into application-specific function hooks.
6821 b. Readline no longer calls getenv() if it's compiled as part of the shell,
6822 which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot redefine getenv(),
6825 c. Fixed translation of ESC when `untranslating' macro values.
6827 d. The region kill operation now fixes the mark if it ends up beyond the
6828 boundaries of the line after the region is deleted.
6830 3. New Features in Bash
6832 a. New argument for `configure': `--with-curses'. This can be used to
6833 override the selection of the termcap library on systems where it is
6836 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6837 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-alpha1,
6838 and the previous version, bash-2.0-release.
6842 a. System-specific configuration changes for: FreeBSD, SunOS4, Irix,
6843 MachTen, QNX 4.2, Harris Night Hawk, SunOS5.
6845 b. System-specific code changes were made for: Linux, 4.4 BSD, QNX 4.2,
6848 c. A bug that caused the exec builtin to fail because the full pathname of
6849 the command could not be found was fixed.
6851 d. The code that performs output redirections is now more resistant to
6852 race conditions and possible security exploits.
6854 e. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing pattern
6855 substitutions on variable values was fixed.
6857 f. More hosts are now recognized by the auto-configuration mechanism
6858 (OpenBSD, QNX, others).
6860 g. Assignments to read-only variables that attempt to convert them to
6861 arrays are now errors.
6863 h. A bug that caused shell scripts using array assignments in POSIX mode
6864 to exit after the assignment was performed was fixed.
6866 i. The substring expansion code is now more careful about running off the
6867 ends of the expanded variable value.
6869 j. A bug that caused completion to fail if a backquoted command substitution
6870 appeared anywhere on the line was fixed.
6872 k. The `source' builtin no longer turns off history if it has been enabled
6873 in a non-interactive shell.
6875 l. A bug that caused the shell to crash when `disown' was given a pid
6876 instead of a job number was fixed.
6878 m. The `cd' spelling correction code will not try to change to `.' if no
6879 directory entries match a single-character argument.
6881 n. A bad variable name supplied to `declare', `export', or `readonly' no
6882 longer causes a non-interactive shell in POSIX mode to exit.
6884 o. Some fixes were made to the test suite to handle peculiarities of
6885 various Unix versions.
6887 p. The bash completion code now quotes characters that readline would
6888 treat as word breaks for completion but are not shell metacharacters.
6890 q. Bad options supplied at invocation now cause a usage message to be
6893 r. Fixes were made to the code that handles DEBUG traps so that the trap
6894 string is not freed inappropriately.
6896 s. Some changes were made to the bash debugger in examples/bashdb -- it
6897 should be closer to working now.
6899 t. A problem that caused the default filename used for mail checking to be
6902 u. A fix was made to the `echo' builtin so that NUL characters printed with
6903 `echo -e' do not cause the output to be truncated.
6905 v. A fix was made to the job control code so that the shell behaves better
6906 when monitor mode is enabled in a non-interactive shell.
6908 w. Bash no longer catches all of the terminating signals in a non-
6909 interactive shell until a trap is set on EXIT, which should result in
6912 x. A fix was made to the command timing code so that `time' can be used in
6915 y. A fix was made to the parser so that `((cmd); cmd2)' is now parsed as
6916 a nested subshell rather than strictly as an (erroneous) arithmetic
6919 z. A fix was made to the globbing code so that it correctly matches quoted
6920 filenames beginning with a `.'.
6922 aa. A bug in `fc' that caused some multi-line commands to not be stored as
6923 one command in the history when they were re-executed after editing
6924 (with `fc -e') was fixed.
6926 bb. The `ulimit' builtin now attempts to catch some classes of integer
6929 cc. The command-oriented-history code no longer attempts to add `;'
6930 inappropriately when a newline appears while reading a $(...) command
6933 dd. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `help --' was executed
6936 ee. A bug that caused the shell to crash when an unset variable appeared
6937 in the body of a here document after `set -u' had been executed was
6940 ff. Implicit input redirections from /dev/null for asynchronous commands
6941 are now handled better.
6943 gg. A bug that caused the shell to fail to compile when configured with
6944 `--disable-readline' was fixed.
6946 hh. The globbing code should now be interruptible.
6948 ii. Bash now notices when the `kill' builtin is used to send SIGCONT to a
6949 stopped job and adjusts the data structures accordingly, as if `bg' had
6950 been executed instead.
6952 jj. A bug that caused the shell to crash when mixing calls to `getopts'
6953 and `shift' on the same set of positional parameters was fixed.
6955 kk. The command printing code now preserves the `-p' flag to `time'.
6957 ll. The command printing code now handles here documents better when there
6958 are other redirections associated with the command.
6960 mm. The special glibc environment variable (NNN_GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_)
6961 is no longer placed into the environment of executed commands -- users
6962 of glibc had too many problems with it.
6964 nn. Reorganized the code that generates signames.h. The signal_names list
6965 is now more complete but may be slightly different (SIGABRT is favored
6966 over SIGIOT, for example). The preferred signal names are those
6967 listed in the POSIX.2 standard.
6969 oo. `bashbug' now uses a filename shorter than 14 characters for its
6970 temporary file, and asks for confirmation before sending the bug
6973 pp. A bug that caused TAB completion in vi editing mode to not be turned
6974 off when `set -o posix' was executed or back on when `set +o posix'
6975 was executed was fixed.
6977 qq. A bug in the brace expansion code that caused brace expansions appearing
6978 in new-style $(...) command substitutions to be inappropriately expanded
6981 rr. A bug in the readline hook shell-expand-line that could cause memory to
6982 be inappropriately freed was fixed.
6984 ss. A bug that caused some arithmetic expressions containing `&&' and `||'
6985 to be parsed with the wrong precedence has been fixed.
6987 tt. References to unbound variables after `set -u' has been executed now
6988 cause the shell to exit immediately, as they should.
6990 uu. A bug that caused the shell to exit inappropriately when `set -e' had
6991 been executed and a command's return status was being inverted with the
6992 `!' reserved word was fixed.
6994 vv. A bug that could occasionally cause the shell to crash with a
6995 divide-by-zero error when timing a command was fixed.
6997 ww. A bug that caused parameter pattern substitution to leave stray
6998 backslashes in the replacement string when the expression is in
6999 double quotes was fixed.
7001 xx. The `break' and `continue' builtins now break out of all loops when an
7002 invalid count argument is supplied.
7004 yy. Fixed a bug that caused PATH to be set to the empty string if
7005 `command -p' is executed with PATH unset.
7007 zz. Fixed `kill -l signum' to print the signal name without the `SIG' prefix,
7010 aaa. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash while setting $SHELLOPTS
7011 if there were no shell options set.
7013 bbb. Fixed `export -p' and `readonly -p' so that when the shell is in POSIX
7014 mode, their output is as POSIX.2 specifies.
7016 ccc. Fixed a bug in `readonly' so that `readonly -a avar=(...)' actually
7017 creates an array variable.
7019 ddd. Fixed a bug that prevented `time' from correctly timing background
7022 2. Changes to Readline
7024 a. A bug that caused an extra newline to be printed when the cursor was on
7025 an otherwise empty line was fixed.
7027 b. An instance of memory being used after it was freed was corrected.
7029 c. The redisplay code now works when the prompt is longer than the screen
7032 d. `dump-macros' is now a bindable name, as it should have been all along.
7034 e. Non-printable characters are now expanded when displaying macros and
7037 f. The `dump-variables' and `dump-macros' commands now output a leading
7038 newline if they're called as the result of a key sequence, rather
7039 than directly by an application.
7041 3. New Features in Bash
7043 a. There is a new builtin array variable: GROUPS, the set of groups to which
7044 the user belongs. This is used by the test suite.
7046 4. New Features in Readline
7048 a. If a key sequence bound to `universal-argument' is read while reading a
7049 numeric argument started with `universal-argument', it terminates the
7050 argument but is otherwise ignored. This provides a way to insert multiple
7051 instances of a digit string, and is how GNU emacs does it.
7053 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7054 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-release,
7055 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta3.
7059 a. Fix to the `getopts' builtin so that it does the right thing when a
7060 required option argument is not present.
7062 b. The completion code now updates the common prefix of matched names
7063 after FIGNORE processing is done, since any names that were removed
7064 may have changed the common prefix.
7066 c. Fixed a bug that made messages in MAILPATH entries not work correctly.
7068 d. Fixed a serious documentation error in the description of the new
7069 ${parameter:offset[:length]} expansion.
7071 e. Fixes to make parameter substring expansion ({$param:offset[:length]})
7072 work when within double quotes.
7074 f. Fixes to make ^A (CTLESC) survive an unquoted expansion of positional
7077 g. Corrected a misspelling of `unlimited' in the output of `ulimit'.
7079 h. Fixed a bug that caused executable scripts without a leading `#!' to
7080 occasionally pick up the wrong set of positional parameters.
7082 i. Linux systems now have a working `ulimit -v', using RLIMIT_AS.
7084 j. Updated config.guess so that many more machine types are recognized.
7086 k. Fixed a bug with backslash-quoted slashes in the ${param/pat[/sub]}
7089 l. If the shell is named `-su', and `-c command' is supplied, read and
7090 execute the login shell startup files even though the shell is not
7091 interactive. This is to support the `-' option to `su'.
7093 m. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps when the DEBUG trap was ignored
7094 with `trap "" DEBUG' and a shell function was subsequently executed.
7096 n. Fixed a bug that caused core dumps in the read builtin when IFS was
7097 set to the null string and the input had leading whitespace.
7099 2. Changes to Readline
7101 a. Fixed a bug that caused a numeric argument of 1024 to be ignored when
7104 b. Fixed the display code so that the numeric argument is displayed as it's
7107 c. Fixed the numeric argument reading code so that `M-- command' is
7108 equivalent to `M--1 command', as the prompt implies.
7110 3. New Features in Bash
7112 a. `ulimit' now sets both hard and soft limits and reports the soft limit
7113 by default (when neither -H nor -S is specified). This is compatible
7114 with versions of sh and ksh that implement `ulimit'.
7116 b. Integer constants have been extended to base 64.
7118 4. New Features in Readline
7120 a. The `home' and `end' keys are now bound to beginning-of-line and
7121 end-of-line, respectively, if the corresponding termcap capabilities
7124 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7125 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta3,
7126 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta2.
7130 a. System-specific changes for: AIX 4.2, SCO 3.2v[45], HP-UX.
7132 b. When in POSIX mode, variable assignments preceding a special builtin
7133 persist in the shell environment after the builtin completes.
7135 c. Changed all calls to getwd() to getcwd(). Improved check for systems
7136 where the libc getcwd() calls popen(), since that breaks on some
7137 systems when job control is being used.
7139 d. Fixed a bug that caused seg faults when executing scripts with the
7140 execute bit set but without a leading `#!'.
7142 e. The environment passed to executed commands is never sorted.
7144 f. A bug was fixed in the code that expands ${name[@]} to the number of
7145 elements in an array variable.
7147 g. A bug was fixed in the array compound assignment code ( A=( ... ) ).
7149 h. Window size changes now correctly propagate down to readline if
7150 the shopt `checkwinsize' option is enabled.
7152 i. A fix was made in the code that expands to the length of a variable
7155 j. A fix was made to the command builtin so that it did not turn on the
7156 `no fork' flag inappropriately.
7158 k. A fix was made to make `set -n' work more reliably.
7160 l. A fix was made to the job control initialization code so that the
7161 terminal process group is set to the shell's process group if the
7162 shell changes its own process group.
7164 2. Changes to Readline
7166 a. System-specific changes for: SCO 3.2v[45].
7168 b. The behavior of the vi-mode `.' when redoing an `i' command was changed
7169 to insert the text previously inserted by the `i' command rather than
7170 simply entering insert mode.
7172 3. New features in Bash
7174 a. There is a new version of the autoload function package, in
7175 examples/functions/autoload.v2, that uses arrays and provides more
7178 b. Support for LC_COLLATE and locale-specific sorting of the results of
7179 pathname expansion if strcoll() is available.
7181 4. New Features in Readline
7183 a. Support for locale-specific sorting of completion possibilities if
7184 strcoll() is available.
7186 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7187 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta2,
7188 and the previous version, bash-2.0-beta1.
7192 a. `pushd -' is once again equivalent to `pushd $OLDPWD'.
7194 b. OS-specific changes for: SCO 3.2v[45].
7196 c. A change was made to the fix for the recently-reported security hole
7197 when reading characters with octal value 255 to make it work better on
7198 systems with restartable system calls when not using readline.
7200 d. Some changes were made to the test suite so that it works if you
7201 configure bash with --enable-usg-echo-default.
7203 e. A fix was made to the parsing of conditional arithmetic expressions.
7205 f. Illegal arithmetic bases now cause an arithmetic evaluation error rather
7206 than being silently reset.
7208 g. Multiple arithmetic bases now cause an arithmetic evaluation error
7209 instead of being ignored.
7211 h. A fix was made to the evaluation of ${param?word} to conform to POSIX.2.
7213 i. A bug that sometimes caused array indices to be evaluated twice (which
7214 would cause errors when they contained assignment statements) was fixed.
7216 j. `ulimit' was rewritten to avoid problems with getrlimit(2) returning
7217 unsigned values and to simplify the code.
7219 k. A bug in the command-oriented-history code that caused it to sometimes
7220 put semicolons after right parens inappropriately was fixed.
7222 l. The values inserted into the prompt by the \w and \W escape sequences
7223 are now quoted to prevent further expansion.
7225 m. An interactive shell invoked as `sh' now reads and executes commands
7226 from the file named by $ENV when it starts up. If it's a login shell,
7227 it does this after reading /etc/profile and ~/.profile.
7229 n. The file named by $ENV is never read by non-interactive shells.
7231 2. Changes to Readline
7233 a. A few changes were made to hide some macros and functions that should not
7236 b. An off-by-one error that caused seg faults in the history expansion code
7239 3. New Features in Bash
7241 a. The ksh-style ((...)) arithmetic command was implemented. It is exactly
7242 identical to let "...". This is controlled by a new option to configure,
7243 `--enable-dparen-arithmetic', which is on by default.
7245 b. There is a new #define available in config.h.top: SYS_BASH_LOGOUT. If
7246 defined to a filename, bash reads and executes commands from that file
7247 when a login shell exits. It's commented out by default.
7249 c. `ulimit' has a `-l' option that reports the maximum amount of data that
7250 may be locked into memory on 4.4BSD-based systems.
7252 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7253 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-beta1,
7254 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha4.
7258 a. A bug that sometimes caused traps to be ignored on signals the
7259 shell treats specially was fixed.
7261 b. The internationalization code was changed to track the values of
7262 LC_* variables and call setlocale() as appropriate. The TEXTDOMAIN
7263 and TEXTDOMAINDIR variables are also tracked; changes cause calls
7264 to textdomain() and bindtextdomain(), if available.
7266 c. A bug was fixed that sometimes caused double-quoted strings to be
7269 d. Changes were made so that the siglist code compiles correctly on
7272 e. Added `:' to the set of characters that cause word breaks for the
7273 completion code so that pathnames in assignments to $PATH can be
7276 f. The `select' command was fixed to print $PS3 to stderr.
7278 g. Fixed an error in the manual page section describing the effect that
7279 setting and unsetting GLOBIGNORE has on the setting of the `dotglob'
7282 h. The time conversion code now uses CLK_TCK rather than CLOCKS_PER_SEC
7283 on systems without gettimeofday() and resources.
7285 i. The getopt static variables are now initialized each time a subshell
7286 is started, so subshells using `getopts' work right.
7288 j. A sign-extension bug that caused a possible security hole was fixed.
7290 k. The parser now reads characters between backquotes within a double-
7291 quoted string as a single word, so double quotes in the backquoted
7292 string don't terminate the enclosing double-quoted string.
7294 l. A bug that caused `^O' to work incorrectly when typed as the first
7295 thing to an interactive shell was fixed.
7297 m. A rarely-exercised off-by-one error in the code that quotes variable
7300 n. Some memory and file descriptor leaks encountered when running a
7301 shell script that is executable but does not have a leading `#!'
7304 2. Changes to Readline
7306 a. A bug that sometimes caused incorrect results when trying to read
7307 typeahead on systems without FIONREAD was fixed.
7309 3. New Features in Bash
7311 a. The command timing code now uses the value of the TIMEFORMAT variable
7312 to format and display timing statistics.
7314 b. The `time' reserved word now accepts a `-p' option to force the
7315 POSIX.2 output format.
7317 c. There are a couple of new and updated scripts to convert csh startup
7318 files to bash format.
7320 d. There is a new builtin array variable: BASH_VERSINFO. The various
7321 members hold the parts of the version information in BASH_VERSION,
7322 plus the value of MACHTYPE.
7324 4. New Features in Readline
7326 a. Setting LANG to `en_US.ISO8859-1' now causes readline to enter
7329 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7330 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha4,
7331 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha3.
7335 a. There is better detection of rsh connections on Solaris 2.
7337 b. Assignments to read-only variables preceding a command name are now
7338 variable assignment errors. Variable assignment errors cause
7339 non-interactive shells running in posix mode to exit.
7341 c. The word tokenizer was rewritten to handle nested quotes and pairs
7342 ('', "", ``, ${...}, $(...), $[...], $'...', $"...", <(...), >(...))
7343 correctly. Some of the parameter expansion code was updated as a
7346 d. A fix was made to `test' when given three arguments so that a binary
7347 operator is checked for first, before checking that the first argument
7350 e. 2''>/dev/null is no longer equivalent to 2>/dev/null.
7352 f. Parser error messages were regularized, and in most cases the name of
7353 the shell script being read by a non-interactive shell is not printed
7356 g. A fix was made to the completion code so that it no longer removes the
7357 text the user typed in some cases.
7359 h. The special glibc `getopt' environment variable is no longer put into
7360 the environment on machines with small values of ARG_MAX.
7362 i. The expansion of ${...} now follows the POSIX.2 rules for finding the
7365 j. The shell no longer displays spurious status messages for background
7366 jobs in shell scripts that complete successfully when the script is
7367 run from a terminal.
7369 k. `shopt -o' now correctly updates $SHELLOPTS.
7371 l. A bug that caused the $PATH searching code to return a non-executable
7372 file even when an executable file with the same name appeared later in
7375 m. The shell now does tilde expansions on unquoted `:~' in assignment
7376 statements when not in posix mode.
7378 n. Variable assignment errors when a command consists only of assignments
7379 now cause non-interactive shells to exit when in posix mode.
7381 o. If the variable in a `for' or `select' command is read-only, or not a
7382 legal shell identifier, a variable assignment error occurs.
7384 p. `test' now handles `-a' and `-o' as binary operators when three arguments
7385 are supplied, and correctly parses `( word )' as equivalent to `word'.
7387 q. `test' was fixed so that file names of the form /dev/fd/NN mean the same
7388 thing on all systems, even Linux.
7390 r. Fixed a bug in the globbing code that caused patterns with multiple
7391 consecutive `*'s to not be matched correctly.
7393 s. Fixed a bug that caused $PS2 to not be printed when an interactive shell
7394 not using readline is reading a here document.
7396 t. Fixed a bug that caused history expansion to be performed inappropriately
7397 when a single-quoted string spanned more than one line.
7399 u. `getopts' now checks that the variable name passed by the user as the
7400 second argument is a legal shell identifier and that the variable is
7403 v. Fixed `getopts' to obey POSIX.2 rules for setting $OPTIND when it
7404 encounters an error.
7406 w. Fixed `set' to display variable values in a form that can be re-read.
7408 x. Fixed a bug in the code that keeps track of whether or not local variables
7409 have been declared at the current level of function nesting.
7411 y. Non-interactive shells in posix mode now exit if the name in a function
7412 declaration is not a legal identifier.
7414 z. The job control code now ignores stopped children when the shell is not
7417 aa. The `cd' builtin no longer attempts spelling correction on the directory
7418 name if the shell is not interactive, regardless of the setting of the
7421 bb. Some OS-specific changes were made for SCO 3.2v[45] and AIX 4.2.
7423 cc. `time' now prints its output to stderr, as POSIX.2 specifies.
7425 2. Fixes to Readline
7427 a. After printing possible completions, all lines of a multi-line prompt
7430 b. Some changes were made to the terminal handling code in rltty.c to
7431 work around AIX 4.2 bugs.
7433 3. New Features in Bash
7435 a. There is a new loadable builtin: sprintf, with calling syntax
7436 sprintf var format [args]
7437 This provides an easy way to simulate ksh left- and right-justified
7440 b. The expansions of \h and \H in prompt strings were swapped. \h now
7441 expands to the hostname up to the first `.', as in bash-1.14.
7443 4. New Features in Readline
7445 a. The bash-1.14 behavior when ^M is typed while doing an incremental
7446 search was restored. ^J may now be used to terminate the search without
7449 b. There is a new bindable variable: disable-completion. This inhibits
7450 word completion and causes the completion character to be inserted as
7451 if it had been bound to self-insert.
7453 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7454 This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha3,
7455 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha2.
7457 There is now a file `COMPAT' included in the distribution that lists the
7458 user-visible incompatibilities between 1.14 and 2.0.
7462 a. Some work was done so that word splitting of the rhs of assignment
7463 statements conforms more closely to historical practice.
7465 b. A couple of errant memory frees were fixed.
7467 c. A fix was made to the test builtin so it recognizes `<' and `>' as
7470 d. The GNU malloc in lib/malloc/malloc.c now scrambles memory as it's
7471 allocated and freed. This is to catch callers that refer to freed
7472 memory or assume something about newly-allocated memory.
7474 e. Fixed a problem with conversion to 12-hour time in the prompt
7477 f. Fixed a problem with configure's argument parsing order. Now you can
7478 correctly turn on specific options after using --enable-minimal-config.
7480 g. The configure script now automatically disables the use of GNU malloc
7481 on systems where it's appropriate (better than having people read the
7482 NOTES file and do it manually).
7484 h. There are new prompt expansions (\v and \V) to insert version information
7485 into the prompt strings.
7487 i. The default prompt string now includes the version number.
7489 j. Most of the builtins that take no options were changed to use the
7490 internal getopt so they can produce proper error messages for -?
7491 and incorrect options.
7493 k. Some system-specific changes were made for SVR4.2 and Solaris 2.5.
7495 l. Bash now uses PATH_MAX instead of MAXPATHLEN and NAME_MAX instead of
7498 m. A couple of problems caused by uninitialized variables were fixed.
7500 n. There are a number of new loadable builtin examples: logname, basename,
7501 dirname, tty, pathchk, tee, head, and rmdir. All of these conform to
7504 o. Bash now notices changes in TZ and calls tzset() if present, so
7505 changing TZ will alter the time printed by prompt expansions.
7507 p. The source was reorganized a bit so I don't have to wait so long for
7508 some files to compile, and to facilitate the creation of a `shell
7509 library' at some future point.
7511 q. Bash no longer turns off job control if called as `sh', since the
7512 POSIX.2 spec includes job control as a standard feature.
7514 r. `bash -o posix' now works as intended.
7516 s. Fixed a problem with the completion code: when completing a filename
7517 that contained globbing characters, if show-all-if-ambiguous was set,
7518 the completion code would remove the user's text.
7520 t. Fixed ulimit so that (hopefully) the full range of limits is available
7523 u. A new `shopt' option (`hostcomplete') enables and disables hostname
7526 v. The shell no longer attempts to save the history on an abort(),
7527 which is usually called by programming_error().
7529 w. The `-s' option to `fc' was changed to echo the command to be executed
7530 to stderr instead of stdout.
7532 x. If the editor invoked by `fc -e' exits with a non-zero status, no
7533 commands are executed.
7535 y. Fixed a bug that made the shopt `histverify' option work incorrectly.
7537 z. There is a new variable `MACHTYPE' whose value is the GNU-style
7538 `cpu-company-system' system description as set by configure. (The
7539 values of MACHTYPE and HOSTTYPE should really be swapped.)
7541 aa. The `ulimit' builtin now allows the maximum virtual memory size to be
7542 set via setrlimit(2) if RLIMIT_VMEM is defined.
7544 bb. `bash -nc 'command'' no longer runs `command'.
7546 2. Changes to Readline
7548 a. Fixed a typo in the code that checked for FIONREAD in input.c.
7550 b. Fixed a bug in the code that outputs keybindings, so things like C-\
7551 are quoted properly.
7553 c. Fixed a bug in the inputrc file parsing code to handle the problems
7554 caused by inputrc files created from the output of `bind -p' in
7555 previous versions of bash. The problem was due to the bug fixed
7558 d. Readline no longer turns off the terminal's meta key, and turns it on
7559 once the first time it's called.
7561 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7562 This file documents the changes between this version, bash-2.0-alpha2,
7563 and the previous version, bash-2.0-alpha.
7567 a. The shell no longer thinks directories are executable.
7569 b. `disown' has a new option, `h', which inhibits the resending of SIGHUP
7570 but does not remove the job from the jobs table.
7572 c. The varargs functions in error.c now use ANSI-C `stdarg' if available.
7574 d. The build process now treats the `build version' in .build as local to
7575 the build directory, so different versions built from the same source
7576 tree have different `build versions'.
7578 e. Some problems with the grammar have been fixed. (It used `list' in a few
7579 productions where `compound_list' was needed. A `list' must be terminated
7580 with a newline or semicolon; a `compound_list' need not be.)
7582 f. A fix was made to keep `wait' from hanging when waiting for all background
7585 g. `bash --help' now writes its output to stdout, like the GNU Coding Standards
7586 specify, and includes the machine type (the value of MACHTYPE).
7588 h. `bash --version' now prints more information and exits successfully, like
7589 the GNU Coding Standards specify.
7591 i. The output of `time' and `times' now prints fractional seconds with three
7592 places after the decimal point.
7594 j. A bug that caused process substitutions to screw up the pipeline printed
7595 by `jobs' was fixed.
7597 k. Fixes were made to the code that implements $'...' and $"..." so they
7600 l. The process substitution code now opens named pipes for reading with
7601 O_NONBLOCK to avoid hanging.
7603 m. Fixes were made to the trap code so the shell cleans up correctly if the
7604 trap command contains a `return' and we're executing a function or
7605 sourcing a script with `.'.
7607 n. Fixes to doc/Makefile.in so that it doesn't try to remake all of the
7608 documentation (ps, dvi, etc.) on a `make install'.
7610 o. Fixed an auto-increment error that caused bash -c args to sometimes dump
7613 p. Fixed a bug that caused $HISTIGNORE to fail when the history line
7614 contained globbing characters.
7616 2. Changes to Readline
7618 a. There is a new string variable, rl_library_version, available for use by
7619 applications. The current value is "2.1".
7621 b. A bug encountered when expand-tilde was enabled and file completion was
7622 attempted on a word beginning with `~/' was fixed.
7624 c. A slight change was made to the incremental search termination behavior.
7625 ESC still terminates the search, but if input is pending or arrives
7626 within 0.1 seconds (on systems with select(2)), it is used as a prefix
7627 character. This is intented to allow users to terminate searches with
7628 the arrow keys and get the behavior they expect.