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 descript
