Bash 4.0

Bash 4.0 has been released and it encompasses lots of new things, described in the announcement.

The most notable new features are associative arrays, improvements to the programmable completion functionality, case-modifying word expansions, co-processes, support for the `**' special glob pattern, and additions to the shell syntax and redirections. The shell has been changed to be more rigorous about parsing commands inside command substitutions, fixing one piece of Posix non-compliance.

I personally used bash 3.2 in Slackware-Current and it's still on /testing because it caused some script to break when we used a backtick on it. I wonder if bash 4.0 will have a solution for this and being used as the default shell in the next Slackware release.