Bash-4.3-beta2 available for FTP

[Chet Ramey]

The second beta release of bash-4.3 is now available with the URL

ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/bash-4.3-beta2.tar.gz

This tar file does not include the formatted documentation (you
should be able to generate it yourself).

This release fixes many outstanding bugs in bash-4.2 and introduces several
new features.  The most significant bug fix is the reworking of signal
handling to avoid running signal and trap handlers in a signal handler
context.  This led to issues with glibc, which uses internal locks
extensively and handles longjmps from user code very poorly.

The most notable new features are the `globasciiranges' shell option, which
forces the pattern matching code to treat [a-z] as if in the C locale;
nameref variables and the changes to allow assigning, referencing, and
unsetting them; improvements to the `direxpand' option introduced in bash-4.2
patch 29; and allowing negative subscripts when assigning and referencing
indexed array elements.

There is one incompatible change between bash-4.2 and bash-4.3.  Bash now
performs quote removal on the replacement string in pattern substitution
(${param/pat/rep}), since the shell treats quotes as special.  If you
have to quote single quotes to get them to be treated literally, the shell
should perform quote removal on them.

`bashbug' may be used to report bugs with this version.  It will send
mail to chet@po.cwru.edu if the shell's `release status' is alpha or
beta.

As always, thanks for your help.

Chet

+========== CHANGES ==========+
This document details the changes between this version, bash-4.3-beta2, and the
previous version, bash-4.3-beta.

1.  Changes to Bash

a.  Fixed a bug that caused assignment to an unset variable using a negative
    subscript to result in a segmentation fault.

b.  Fixed a bug that caused assignment to a string variable using a negative
    subscript to use the incorrect index.

c.  Fixed a bug that caused some strings to be interpreted as invalid
    extended globbing expressions when used with the help builtin.

d.  Fixed a bug that caused an attempt to trap a signal whose disposition
    cannot be changed to reference uninitialized memory.

e.  Command completion now skips assignment statements preceding a command
    name and completes the command.

f.  Fixed a bug that caused `compgen -f' in a non-interactive shell to dump
    core under certain circumstances.

g.  Fixed a bug that caused the `read -N' to misbehave when the input stream
    contains 0xff.

2.  Changes to Readline

a.  Changed message when an incremental search fails to include "failed" in
    the prompt and display the entire search string instead of just the last
    matching portion.

b.  Fixed a bug that caused an arrow key typed to an incremental search prompt
    to process the key sequence incorrectly.

c.  Additional key bindings for arrow keys on MinGW.

3.  New Features in Bash

a.  The help builtin now attempts substring matching (as it did through
    bash-4.2) if exact string matching fails.

b.  The fc builtin now interprets -0 as the current command line.

c.  Completing directory names containing shell variables now adds a trailing
    slash if the expanded result is a directory.

4.  New Features in Readline

a.  rl_change_environment: new application-settable variable that controls
    whether or not Readline modifies the environment (currently readline
    modifies only LINES and COLUMNS).


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/