Bash 5.0 Release Packing Many Changes & A Lot Of Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Bash 5.0 Release Candidate Packing Many Changes & A Lot Of Fixes

The release candidate of the upcoming GNU Bash 5.0 shell release is now available. Bash 5.0 is packing various fixes over Bash 4.4 but also a number of new features and improvements to better conform to POSIX specifications...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bash-5.0-Release-Candidate

[wizard69]

It is great that BASH is about to arrive in a new version, fixes and updates are always welcomed. The problem I have is all the new "features" added that very few will remember and in some case ever be aware of. I suspect that this is one reason for my liking Python so much, a clean simple language that doesn't leave me guessing, searching documents or nor forgetting what I wrote years ago does

[tildearrow]

EPOCHREALTIME is similar to EPOCHSECONDS for obtaining the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch, but this version is floating point with micro-second granularity

Then it ought to be a 64-bit floating point number, and even if so, it wouldn't be able to hold full microsecond precision in 200 years...

[Delgarde]

It is great that BASH is about to arrive in a new version, fixes and updates are always welcomed. The problem I have is all the new "features" added that very few will remember and in some case ever be aware of. I suspect that this is one reason for my liking Python so much, a clean simple language that doesn't leave me guessing, searching documents or nor forgetting what I wrote years ago does

Not really comparable... they're both scripting languages, but they serve completely different purposes. Python is a great language for general-purpose scripting, where you might need some complex logic, or some network I/O or maybe XML/JSON parsing. It's pretty clumsy for anything that involves running external processes though, which of course is the entire point of a shell language like Bash.

Not sure how you can say Python doesn't leave you searching documents, though... I've spent vastly more time digging around in the Python reference material than in the Bash man pages... which is exactly what you'd expect of a more complex language with a rich standard library to work with.

[Delgarde]

Then it ought to be a 64-bit floating point number, and even if so, it wouldn't be able to hold full microsecond precision in 200 years...

I struggle to see the use case for that one, honestly. EPOCHSECONDS, yeah, it's occasionally useful to know the current time (e.g. finding all files created since a particular point during the script), and that's a little nicer than forking to run "date +%s". But anything needing microsecond precision seems like quite an edge case...

[Uqbar]

RELEASE, not RELEASE CANDIDATE, though.

> The first public release of bash-5.0 is now available...

[starshipeleven]

Not sure how you can say Python doesn't leave you searching documents, though... I've spent vastly more time digging around in the Python reference material than in the Bash man pages... which is exactly what you'd expect of a more complex language with a rich standard library to work with.

He means that many things done in bash have some (necessary) abomination like
command -aasfswrwefwrefrwe /sfwr/wrtegf -sdfgsf /asdqwed/sfsdf/wgsd | grep "asd" | awk -F"etw" {print $7} | sort -u

that makes impossible to remember what exactly is that line doing, and you will need to look up stuff to read it more often than not.

With actual programming languages you are calling functions from libraries, not parsing ASCII spit by an application's cli interface.

Which, as long as you aren't doing something extremely esoteric you can usually understand at a glance.