Introduction ============ The first public release of bash-4.1 is now available with the URLs
ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/bash-4.1.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/bash/bash-4.1.tar.gz and from the usual GNU mirror sites. Unlike previous bash distributions, this tar file includes the formatted documentation (postscript, dvi, html, and nroffed versions of the manual pages). Diffs from bash-4.0 are not available. Please use `bashbug' to report bugs with this version. It is built and installed at the same time as bash. Installation ============ Please read the README file first. Installation instructions are provided in the INSTALL file. New Features ============ This is the first revision to the fourth major release of bash. This release fixes several outstanding bugs in bash-4.0 and introduces a number of new features -- a larger number than usual for a minor version release. The most notable new features are a dynamic programmable completion definition framework, a "default" programmable completion option, a way to pass shell options to subshells, a mechansim to have redirections allocate and assign a file descriptor to a shell variable, and a way to direct xtrace output to an arbitrary file descriptor. Read the file NEWS in the bash-4.1 distribution for a complete description of the new features. A copy of the relevant portions is included below. Changes have been made to the Readline library being released at the same time as bash-4.1, readline-6.1, so that Bash can be linked against an already-installed Readline library rather than the private version in lib/readline. Only readline-6.0 and later versions are able to provide all of the symbols that bash-4.1 requires; earlier versions of the Readline library will not work correctly. A complete list of changes between bash-4.0 and bash-4.1 is available in the file CHANGES; the complete list is too large to include in this message. Readline ======== Also available is a new release of the standalone Readline library, version 6.1, with its own configuration scripts and Makefiles. It can be retrieved with the URLs ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-6.1.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/readline/readline-6.1.tar.gz and from the usual GNU mirror sites. Diffs from readline-6.0 are not available. The formatted Readline documentation is included in the readline distribution tar file. A separate announcement listing the changes in Readline is being distributed. As always, thanks for your help. Chet +========== NEWS ==========+ This is a terse description of the new features added to bash-4.1 since the release of bash-4.0. As always, the manual page (doc/bash.1) is the place to look for complete descriptions. 1. New Features in Bash a. Here-documents within $(...) command substitutions may once more be delimited by the closing right paren, instead of requiring a newline. b. Bash's file status checks (executable, readable, etc.) now take file system ACLs into account on file systems that support them. c. Bash now passes environment variables with names that are not valid shell variable names through into the environment passed to child processes. d. The `execute-unix-command' readline function now attempts to clear and reuse the current line rather than move to a new one after the command executes. e. `printf -v' can now assign values to array indices. f. New `complete -E' and `compopt -E' options that work on the "empty" completion: completion attempted on an empty command line. g. New complete/compgen/compopt -D option to define a `default' completion: a completion to be invoked on command for which no completion has been defined. If this function returns 124, programmable completion is attempted again, allowing a user to dynamically build a set of completions as completion is attempted by having the default completion function install individual completion functions each time it is invoked. h. When displaying associative arrays, subscripts are now quoted. i. Changes to dabbrev-expand to make it more `emacs-like': no space appended after matches, completions are not sorted, and most recent history entries are presented first. j. The [[ and (( commands are now subject to the setting of `set -e' and the ERR trap. k. The source/. builtin now removes NUL bytes from the file before attempting to parse commands. l. There is a new configuration option (in config-top.h) that forces bash to forward all history entries to syslog. m. A new variable $BASHOPTS to export shell options settable using `shopt' to child processes. n. There is a new confgure option that forces the extglob option to be enabled by default. o. New variable $BASH_XTRACEFD; when set to an integer bash will write xtrace output to that file descriptor. p. If the optional left-hand-side of a redirection is of the form {var}, the shell assigns the file descriptor used to $var or uses $var as the file descriptor to move or close, depending on the redirection operator. q. The < and > operators to the [[ conditional command now do string comparison according to the current locale if the compatibility level is greater than 40. r. Programmable completion now uses the completion for `b' instead of `a' when completion is attempted on a line like: a $(b c. s. Force extglob on temporarily when parsing the pattern argument to the == and != operators to the [[ command, for compatibility. t. Changed the behavior of interrupting the wait builtin when a SIGCHLD is received and a trap on SIGCHLD is set to be Posix-mode only. u. The read builtin has a new `-N nchars' option, which reads exactly NCHARS characters, ignoring delimiters like newline. v. The mapfile/readarray builtin no longer stores the commands it invokes via callbacks in the history list. w. There is a new `compat40' shopt option. 2. New Features in Readline a. New bindable function: menu-complete-backward. b. In the vi insertion keymap, C-n is now bound to menu-complete by default, and C-p to menu-complete-backward. c. When in vi command mode, repeatedly hitting ESC now does nothing, even when ESC introduces a bound key sequence. This is closer to how historical vi behaves. d. New bindable function: skip-csi-sequence. Can be used as a default to consume key sequences generated by keys like Home and End without having to bind all keys. e. New application-settable function: rl_filename_rewrite_hook. Can be used to rewite or modify filenames read from the file system before they are compared to the word to be completed. f. New bindable variable: skip-completed-text, active when completing in the middle of a word. If enabled, it means that characters in the completion that match characters in the remainder of the word are "skipped" rather than inserted into the line. g. The pre-readline-6.0 version of menu completion is available as "old-menu-complete" for users who do not like the readline-6.0 version. h. New bindable variable: echo-control-characters. If enabled, and the tty ECHOCTL bit is set, controls the echoing of characters corresponding to keyboard-generated signals. i. New bindable variable: enable-meta-key. Controls whether or not readline sends the smm/rmm sequences if the terminal indicates it has a meta key that enables eight-bit characters. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU c...@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
