Bash 5.0 Release Packing Many Changes & A Lot Of Fixes

The release 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.

Among the many changes to Bash 5.0 compared to the previous stable release are:

- BASH_ARGV0 is a new Bash 5.0 variable, which expands to the name of the shell or shell script, similar to $0.

- EPOCHSECONDS as another new variable when referenced, expands to the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (Unix timestamp).

- 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.

- The Bash history built-in can now remove ranges of history entries.

- The globasciiranges option is now enabled by default, which alters the behavior of character ranges used in pattern matching expressions.

- Quite a lot of bug fixes.

More details on the Bash 5.0 release via this mailing list post. There is also the CHANGES file that outlines the many additions to Bash 5.0 as well as the ton of bug-fixing compared to Bash 4.4. Also released today was Readline 8.0 that is a standalone version of the Readline library outside of Bash.