Almost three years after Bash 5.2, and following a year-long cycle of beta and release candidate builds, the most popular command-line shell and scripting language used in Unix-like operating systems has released version 5.3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The headline feature is a pair of new substitution forms, Another welcome addition is Power users who live in tab completion will appreciate Under the hood, the codebase has been updated to ensure conformance with C23 (the latest revision of the C programming language standard). As a consequence, Bash will no longer build with K&R-era compilers\u2014a footnote for most distributions but a signal that legacy toolchains need to move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last but not least, Bash 5.3\u2019s twin, Readline 8.3, was released the same day. The standalone library now offers case-insensitive searching (${ command; }<\/code> and ${|command;}<\/code>, that run in the current<\/em> shell context rather than in a child process. That change means scripts can capture output (or let the command write to REPLY<\/code>) without paying the usual fork-and-pipe overhead\u2014handy for tight loops and embedded systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGLOBSORT<\/code>, a shell variable that lets users dictate how pathname expansions are ordered\u2014by name, size, various timestamps, or even unsorted\u2014and whether the list is ascending or descending.<\/p>\n\n\n\ncompgen -V<\/code>, which can stuff generated completions directly into a variable, and read -E<\/code>, which now borrows Readline\u2019s programmable completion when grabbing interactive input. Meanwhile, source -p PATH<\/code> allows scripts to \u201cdot in\u201d companion files from an explicit search path instead of $PATH<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nsearch-ignore-case<\/code>), a callable execute-named-command<\/code>, and an export-completions<\/code> facility for feeding completion data to external programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n