Now that we have covered some of the minor improvements found in bash 4.x, we will begin looking at the more significant new features focusing on changes in the way bash 4.x handles expansions.

The devil they say is in details, even the simple Bash path variable can open some security problems on your box. Every Bash documentation out there warns us not leave '.' in the path (it matches current directory). They however don't seems to mention that leaving a dangling ':' (colon) at the beginning or the end of Bash $PATH does create the same security vulnerability.

In this installment, we are going to look at a couple of commands that have been updated in bash 4.x

In this final installment of our series, we will look at perhaps the most significant area of change in bash version 4.x: arrays.

So what's new in bash? A bunch of things, though most of them tend to be rather small. In this series we will look at features that, I feel, are of the most use to ordinary shell users starting with a couple of the small ones.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" associative arrays that were added in version 4.0 of bash.

Bourne-again shell (Bash) version 4.0 has been released and includes several fixes to serious bugs from the 3.x releases and some significant new features.

This article is a continuation to my other Bash-related post, 6 Bash Productivity Tips. Since that article gathered many useful comments and I bumped into several more over the net, here are 5 more tips and tricks. Although these may not be necessarily productivity-related, they will surely ease working in a Bash terminal and it may be worth knowing them.