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.

Finding Your Version

How do you know if you are using the latest, greatest bash?  By issuing a command of course:

me@linuxbox: ~$ echo $BASH_VERSION
4.1.2(1)-release

bash maintains a shell variable called BASH_VERSION that always contains the version number of the shell in use.  The example above is from my Ubuntu 10.04 test machine and it dutifully reveals that we are running bash version 4.1.2.

Better help

The help command, which is used to display documentation for the shell's builtin commands, got some much needed attention in the new version of bash.  The command has some new options and the help text itself has been reformatted and improved.  For example, here is the result of the help cd command in bash 3.2:

bshotts@twin2:~$ help cd
cd: cd [-L|-P] [dir]
    Change the current directory to DIR.  The variable $HOME is the
    default DIR.  The variable CDPATH defines the search path for
    the directory containing DIR.  Alternative directory names in CDPATH
    are separated by a colon (:).  A null directory name is the same as
    the current directory, i.e. `.'.  If DIR begins with a slash (/),
    then CDPATH is not used.  If the directory is not found, and the
    shell option `cdable_vars' is set, then try the word as a variable
    name.  If that variable has a value, then cd to the value of that
    variable.  The -P option says to use the physical directory structure
    instead of following symbolic links; the -L option forces symbolic links
    to be followed.

The same command in bash 4.1:

bshotts@twin7:~$ help cd
cd: cd [-L|-P] [dir]
    Change the shell working directory.
  
    Change the current directory to DIR.  The default DIR is the value of the
    HOME shell variable.
  
    The variable CDPATH defines the search path for the directory containing
    DIR.  Alternative directory names in CDPATH are separated by a colon (:).
    A null directory name is the same as the current directory.  If DIR begins
    with a slash (/), then CDPATH is not used.
  
    If the directory is not found, and the shell option `cdable_vars' is set,
    the word is assumed to be  a variable name.  If that variable has a value,
    its value is used for DIR.
  
    Options:
        -L    force symbolic links to be followed
        -P    use the physical directory structure without following symbolic
        links
  
    The default is to follow symbolic links, as if `-L' were specified.
  
    Exit Status:
    Returns 0 if the directory is changed; non-zero otherwise.

As you can see, the output is more "man page-like" than the previous version, as well as better written.  help also includes two new options, -d which displays a short description of the command and the -m option which displays the help text in full man page format.

New Redirections

It is now possible to combine both standard output and standard error from a command and append it to a file using this form:

command &>> file

Likewise, it is possible to pipe the combined output streams using this:

command1 |& command2

where the standard output and standard error of command1 is piped into the standard input of command2.  This form may be used in place of the traditional form:

command1 2>&1 | command2

Further Reading

Here are some change summaries for the 4.x version of bash:

• http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/bash4
• http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/NEWS

Other installments in this series: 1 2 3 4