Some of you maybe already know about the news, but GNU Bash 4.0 was released a while ago. There are some interesting good news in this release. For example, now Bash ships with support for associative arrays (hashes) out-of-the-shell. This will make some Bill modules like data/hash unneeded in the long term, as well as providing a nice speedup to code using it. But do not let your imagination fly before thinking a bit about the following: a critical piece of the base system like the shell will not be updated by your favourite distributors in a while.

Bash 3.2 has died… long live Bash 3.2!