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From: chet@odin.INS.CWRU.Edu (Chet Ramey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.questions,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Bash-2.01 and Readline-2.1 released
Date: 6 Jun 1997 16:20:24 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University
Lines: 550
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <5n9dc8$776@alexander.INS.CWRU.Edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: odin.ins.cwru.edu
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.shell:45778 comp.unix.questions:100860 comp.os.linux.misc:179177 comp.unix.bsd.misc:3516
The first open release of bash-2.01 is now available with the URL
ftp://slc2.ins.cwru.edu/pub/dist/bash-2.01.tar.gz
This tar file does not include the formatted documentation
(postscript, dvi, html, and nroffed versions of the manual pages);
that may be retrieved with the URL
ftp://slc2.ins.cwru.edu/pub/dist/bash-doc-2.01.tar.gz
When unpacking the documentation, make sure to extract the tar file
in the bash-2.01 source directory.
Diffs from bash-2.0 are available with the URL
ftp://slc2.ins.cwru.edu/pub/dist/bash-2.0-2.01.diff.gz
Beware -- the diffs are huge. Over 330 KB gzipped.
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.
Fixes and New Features
======================
The focus of this release is fixing the bugs found with the
bash-2.0 distribution. A complete list of changes since bash-2.0
is appended to this message. There were only a few new features
added; so few, in fact, that I can list them here.
1. There is a new builtin array variable: GROUPS. Its members
are the set of groups to which the user belongs. It is used
by the test suite.
2. `Configure' has a new argument: `--with-curses'. This forces
the use of the curses library instead of the termcap library,
and can be used on systems where the termcap library or database
is deficient. I use it on AIX 4.2 and 4.1.4.
3. There are two new bindable readline commands: alias-expand-line
and history-and-alias-expand-line. The code was always in there;
there was just no way to bind a key sequence to the functions.
Readline has a single new feature, added as the result of a bug report.
1. If a key sequence bound to `universal-argument' is read while
reading a numeric argument started with `universal-argument', it
terminates the argument but is otherwise ignored. This provides
a way to insert multiple instances of a digit string, and is how
GNU emacs does it.
Dozens of bugs in bash-2.0 have been fixed. The most-frequently-encountered
ones are listed below.
1. A construct like $((foo);bar) is now processed as a command substitution
rather than as a bad arithmetic substitution.
2. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing pattern
substitutions on variable values was fixed.
3. The substring expansion code is now more careful about running off the
ends of the expanded variable value.
4. A problem that caused the default filename used for mail checking to be
wrong was fixed.
5. Fixes were made to the command timing code so that `time' can be
used in a loop and will correctly time backgrounded commands.
6. A fix was made to the parser so that `((cmd); cmd2)' is now parsed as
a nested subshell rather than strictly as an (errnoeous) arithmetic
command. Netscape should no longer complain when running helper apps.
7. The special glibc environment variable (NNN_GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_)
is no longer placed into the environment of executed commands -- users
of glibc had too many problems with it.
User-Visible Changes
====================
There is one user-visible change that bears mentioning. As
the result of numerous requests, directory name spelling
correction in `cd' is now disabled by default. You can turn it
on with `shopt -s cdspell'.
Other user-visible changes are listed in the file COMPAT.
Other Changes and Updates
=========================
The test suite has been greatly expanded, and the shell has been
run through `purify' with the new tests. Many memory leaks have
been fixed.
Work was done to speed up non-interactive shell execution, so
shell scripts should run faster now. I always welcome ideas for
speeding up the shell.
A Peek at the Future
========================
Work that has been completed and is ready for inclusion in bash-2.02
includes
o Fixes to the globbing code to fully implement POSIX.2
pattern matching (character classes, collating symbols,
equivalence classes)
o A newer version of malloc that provides correct alignment
on 64-bit machines and wastes far less memory. This is
much faster than the `gmalloc' included in the distribution
and nearly as good about the amount of memory it requests
from the kernel, for the bash allocation patterns.
These were not included in bash-2.01 because of the focus on fixing
bugs and increasing stability.
Other things under consideration for bash-2.02 are
o An implementation of programmable completion for the bash
readline interface
o ksh egrep-style extended pattern matching
Readline
========
Also available is the release of the standalone readline library,
version 2.1, with its own configuration scripts and Makefiles.
It can be retrieved with the URL
ftp://slc2.ins.cwru.edu/pub/dist/readline-2.1.tar.gz
and from the usual GNU mirror sites.
The formatted readline documentation is included in the readline
distribution tar file.
As always, thanks for your help.
Chet
+========== CHANGES ==========+
This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-release,
and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta2.
1. Changes to Bash
a. The `distclean' target should remove the `printenv' executable if it
has been created.
b. The test suite was changed slightly to ensure that the error messages
are printed in English.
c. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when a filename containing a
`/' was passed to `hash' was fixed.
d. Pathname canonicalization now leaves a leading `//' intact, as POSIX.1
requires.
e. A memory leak when completing commands was fixed.
f. A memory leak that occurred when checking the hash table for commands
with relative paths was fixed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta2,
and the previous version, bash-2.01-beta1.
1. Changes to Bash
a. The `ulimit' builtin translates RLIM_INFINITY to the hard limit only if
the current (soft) limit is less than or equal to the hard limit.
b. Fixed a bug that caused the bash emulation of strcasecmp to produce
incorrect results.
c. A bug that caused memory to be freed twice when a trap handler resets
the trap more than once was fixed.
d. A bug that caused machines where sizeof (pointer) > sizeof (int) to
fail (and possibly dump core) when trying to unwind-protect a null
pointer was fixed.
e. The startup files should not be run with job control enabled. This fix
allows SIGINT to once again interrupt startup file execution.
f. Bash should not change the SIGPROF handler if it is set to something
other than SIG_DFL.
g. The completion code that provides bash-specific completions for readline
now quotes characters that the readline code would treat as word break
characters if they appear in a file name.
h. The completion code now correctly quotes filenames containing a `!',
even if the user attempted to use double quotes when attempting
completion.
i. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `disown' was called without
arguments and there was no current job was fixed.
j. A construct like $((foo);bar) is now processed as a command substitution
rather than as a bad arithmetic substitution.
k. A couple of bugs that caused `fc' to not obey the `cmdhist' and `lithist'
shell options when editing and re-executing a series of commands were
fixed.
l. A fix was made to the grammar -- the list of commands between `do' and
`done' in the body of a `for' command should be treated the same as a
while loop.
2. Changes to Readline
a. A couple of bugs that caused the history search functions to attempt to
free a NULL pointer were fixed.
b. If the C library provides setlocale(3), readline does not need to look
at various environment variables to decide whether or not to go into
eight-bit mode automatically -- just check whether the current locale
is not `C' or `POSIX'.
c. If the filename completion function finds that a directory was not closed
by a previous (interrupted) completion, it closes the directory with
closedir().
3. New Features in Bash
a. New bindable readline commands: history-and-alias-expand-line and
alias-expand-line. The code was always in there, there was just no
way to execute it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-beta1,
and the previous version, bash-2.01-alpha1.
1. Changes to Bash
a. Fixed a problem that could cause file descriptors used for process
substitution to conflict with those used explicitly in redirections.
b. Made it easier to regenerate configure if the user changes configure.in.
c. ${GROUPS[0]} should always be the primary group, even on systems without
multiple groups.
d. Spelling correction is no longer enabled by default.
e. Fixes to quoting problems in `bashbug'.
f. OS-specific configuration changes were made for: Irix 6.
g. OS-specific code changes were made for: QNX.
h. A more meaningful message is now printed when the file in /tmp for a
here document cannot be created.
i. Many changes to the shell's variable initialization code to speed
non-interactive startup.
j. Changes to the non-job-control code so that it does not try to open
/dev/tty.
k. The output of `set' and `export' is once again sorted, as POSIX wants.
l. Fixed a problem caused by a recursive call reparsing the value of
$SHELLOPTS.
m. The tilde code no longer calls getenv() when it's compiled as part of
the shell, which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot
redefine getenv(), like the NeXT OS.
n. Fixed a problem that caused `bash -o' or `bash +o' to not list all
the shell options.
o. Fixed `ulimit' to convert RLIM_INFINITY to the appropriate hard limit
only if the hard limit is greater than the current (soft) limit.
p. Fixed a problem that arose when building bash in a different directory
than the source and y.tab.[ch] were remade with something other than
bison. This came up most often on NetBSD.
q. Fixed a problem with completion -- it thought that `pwd`/[TAB] indicated
an unfinished command completion (`/), which generated errors.
r. The bash special tilde expansions (~-, ~+) are now attempted before
calling the standard tilde expansion code, which should eliminate the
problems people have been seeing with this on Solaris 2.5.1.
s. Added support for <stdarg.h> to places where it was missing.
t. Changed the code that reads the output of a command substitution to not
go through stdio. This reduces the memory requirements and is faster.
u. A number of changes to speed up export environment creation were made.
v. A number of memory leaks were fixed as the result of running the test
scripts through Purify.
w. Fixed a bug that caused subshells forked to interpret executable
scripts without a leading `#!' to not reinitialize the values of
the shell options.
2. Changes to Readline
a. History library has less `#ifdef SHELL' code -- abstracted stuff out
into application-specific function hooks.
b. Readline no longer calls getenv() if it's compiled as part of the shell,
which should eliminate problems on systems that cannot redefine getenv(),
like the NeXT OS.
c. Fixed translation of ESC when `untranslating' macro values.
d. The region kill operation now fixes the mark if it ends up beyond the
boundaries of the line after the region is deleted.
3. New Features in Bash
a. New argument for `configure': `--with-curses'. This can be used to
override the selection of the termcap library on systems where it is
deficient.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This document details the changes between this version, bash-2.01-alpha1,
and the previous version, bash-2.0-release.
1. Changes to Bash
a. System-specific configuration changes for: FreeBSD, SunOS4, Irix,
MachTen, QNX 4.2, Harris Night Hawk, SunOS5.
b. System-specific code changes were made for: Linux, 4.4 BSD, QNX 4.2,
HP-UX, AIX 4.2.
c. A bug that caused the exec builtin to fail because the full pathname of
the command could not be found was fixed.
d. The code that performs output redirections is now more resistant to
race conditions and possible security exploits.
e. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when performing pattern
substitutions on variable values was fixed.
f. More hosts are now recognized by the auto-configuration mechanism
(OpenBSD, QNX, others).
g. Assignments to read-only variables that attempt to convert them to
arrays are now errors.
h. A bug that caused shell scripts using array assignments in POSIX mode
to exit after the assignment was performed was fixed.
i. The substring expansion code is now more careful about running off the
ends of the expanded variable value.
j. A bug that caused completion to fail if a backquoted command substitution
appeared anywhere on the line was fixed.
k. The `source' builtin no longer turns off history if it has been enabled
in a non-interactive shell.
l. A bug that caused the shell to crash when `disown' was given a pid
instead of a job number was fixed.
m. The `cd' spelling correction code will not try to change to `.' if no
directory entries match a single-character argument.
n. A bad variable name supplied to `declare', `export', or `readonly' no
longer causes a non-interactive shell in POSIX mode to exit.
o. Some fixes were made to the test suite to handle peculiarities of
various Unix versions.
p. The bash completion code now quotes characters that readline would
treat as word breaks for completion but are not shell metacharacters.
q. Bad options supplied at invocation now cause a usage message to be
displayed.
r. Fixes were made to the code that handles DEBUG traps so that the trap
string is not freed inappropriately.
s. Some changes were made to the bash debugger in examples/bashdb -- it
should be closer to working now.
t. A problem that caused the default filename used for mail checking to be
wrong was fixed.
u. A fix was made to the `echo' builtin so that NUL characters printed with
`echo -e' do not cause the output to be truncated.
v. A fix was made to the job control code so that the shell behaves better
when monitor mode is enabled in a non-interactive shell.
w. Bash no longer catches all of the terminating signals in a non-
interactive shell until a trap is set on EXIT, which should result in
quicker startup.
x. A fix was made to the command timing code so that `time' can be used in
a loop.
y. A fix was made to the parser so that `((cmd); cmd2)' is now parsed as
a nested subshell rather than strictly as an (errnoeous) arithmetic
command.
z. A fix was made to the globbing code so that it correctly matches quoted
filenames beginning with a `.'.
aa. A bug in `fc' that caused some multi-line commands to not be stored as
one command in the history when they were re-executed after editing
(with `fc -e') was fixed.
bb. The `ulimit' builtin now attempts to catch some classes of integer
overflows.
cc. The command-oriented-history code no longer attempts to add `;'
inappropriately when a newline appears while reading a $(...) command
substitution.
dd. A bug that caused the shell to dump core when `help --' was executed
was fixed.
ee. A bug that caused the shell to crash when an unset variable appeared
in the body of a here document after `set -u' had been executed was
fixed.
ff. Implicit input redirections from /dev/null for asynchronous commands
are now handled better.
gg. A bug that caused the shell to fail to compile when configured with
`--disable-readline' was fixed.
hh. The globbing code should now be interruptible.
ii. Bash now notices when the `kill' builtin is used to send SIGCONT to a
stopped job and adjusts the data structures accordingly, as if `bg' had
been executed instead.
jj. A bug that caused the shell to crash when mixing calls to `getopts'
and `shift' on the same set of positional parameters was fixed.
kk. The command printing code now preserves the `-p' flag to `time'.
ll. The command printing code now handles here documents better when there
are other redirections associated with the command.
mm. The special glibc environment variable (NNN_GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_)
is no longer placed into the environment of executed commands -- users
of glibc had too many problems with it.
nn. Reorganized the code that generates signames.h. The signal_names list
is now more complete but may be slightly different (SIGABRT is favored
over SIGIOT, for example). The preferred signal names are those
listed in the POSIX.2 standard.
oo. `bashbug' now uses a filename shorter than 14 characters for its
temporary file, and asks for confirmation before sending the bug
report.
pp. A bug that caused TAB completion in vi editing mode to not be turned
off when `set -o posix' was executed or back on when `set +o posix'
was executed was fixed.
qq. A bug in the brace expansion code that caused brace expansions appearing
in new-style $(...) command substitutions to be inappropriately expanded
was fixed.
rr. A bug in the readline hook shell-expand-line that could cause memory to
be inappropriately freed was fixed.
ss. A bug that caused some arithmetic expressions containing `&&' and `||'
to be parsed with the wrong precedence has been fixed.
tt. References to unbound variables after `set -u' has been executed now
cause the shell to exit immediately, as they should.
uu. A bug that caused the shell to exit inappropriately when `set -e' had
been executed and a command's return status was being inverted with the
`!' reserved word was fixed.
vv. A bug that could occasionally cause the shell to crash with a
divide-by-zero error when timing a command was fixed.
ww. A bug that caused parameter pattern substitution to leave stray
backslashes in the replacement string when the expression is in
double quotes was fixed.
xx. The `break' and `continue' builtins now break out of all loops when an
invalid count argument is supplied.
yy. Fixed a bug that caused PATH to be set to the empty string if
`command -p' is executed with PATH unset.
zz. Fixed `kill -l signum' to print the signal name without the `SIG' prefix,
as POSIX specifies.
aaa. Fixed a bug that caused the shell to crash while setting $SHELLOPTS
if there were no shell options set.
bbb. Fixed `export -p' and `readonly -p' so that when the shell is in POSIX
mode, their output is as POSIX.2 specifies.
ccc. Fixed a bug in `readonly' so that `readonly -a avar=(...)' actually
creates an array variable.
ddd. Fixed a bug that prevented `time' from correctly timing background
pipelines.
2. Changes to Readline
a. A bug that caused an extra newline to be printed when the cursor was on
an otherwise empty line was fixed.
b. An instance of memory being used after it was freed was corrected.
c. The redisplay code now works when the prompt is longer than the screen
width.
d. `dump-macros' is now a bindable name, as it should have been all along.
e. Non-printable characters are now expanded when displaying macros and
their values.
f. The `dump-variables' and `dump-macros' commands now output a leading
newline if they're called as the result of a key sequence, rather
than directly by an application.
3. New Features in Bash
a. There is a new builtin array variable: GROUPS, the set of groups to which
the user belongs. This is used by the test suite.
4. New Features in Readline
a. If a key sequence bound to `universal-argument' is read while reading a
numeric argument started with `universal-argument', it terminates the
argument but is otherwise ignored. This provides a way to insert multiple
instances of a digit string, and is how GNU emacs does it.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University Internet: chet@po.CWRU.Edu