Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/839212/rss

Bash 5.1 is out. “This release fixes several outstanding bugs in bash-5.0 and introduces
several new features. The most significant change is a return to the
bash-4.4 behavior of not performing pathname expansion on a word that
contains backslashes but does not contain any unquoted globbing special
characters. This comes after a long POSIX discussion that resulted in a
change to the standard. There are several changes regarding trap handling
while reading from the terminal (e.g, for `read’ and `select’.) There are a
number of bug fixes, including several bugs that caused the shell to
crash.”

The readline library used in bash 5.1 has also been updated to version 8.1. “There are more
improvements in the programming interface and new user-visible variables
and bindable commands. There are a several new public API functions, but
there should be no incompatible changes to existing APIs.”