New Features In Bash Version 4.x – Part 1

“As I mention in the introduction to The Linux Command Line, the
command line is a long lasting skill. It’s quite possible that a
script that you wrote ten years ago still works perfectly well
today. But even so, every few years the GNU Project releases a new
version of bash. While I was writing the book, version 3.2 was the
predominate version found in Linux distributions. In February of
2009 however a new major version of bash (4.0) appeared and it
began to show up in distributions last fall. Today the current
version of bash is 4.1 and it, too, is beginning to show up in
distributions such as Ubuntu 10.04 and (I presume, since I haven’t
checked yet) Fedora 13.

“So what’s new in bash? A bunch of things, though most of them
tend to be rather small. In this series we will look at features
that, I feel, are of the most use to ordinary shell users starting
with a couple of the small ones.”

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