Summary of bash Features

bash is a backward-compatible evolutionary successor to the Bourne shell that includes most of the C shell's major advantages as well as features from the Korn shell and a few new features of its own. Features appropriated from the C shell include:

· Directory manipulation, with the pushd , popd , and dirs commands.

· Job control, including the fg and bg commands and the ability to stop jobs with CTRL-Z.

· Brace expansion, for generating arbitrary strings.

· Tilde expansion, a shorthand way to refer to directories.

· Aliases, which allow you to define shorthand names for commands or command lines.

· Command history, which lets you recall previously entered commands.

bash 's major new features include:

· Command-line editing, allowing you to use vi- or emacs -style editing commands on your command lines.

· Key bindings that allow you to set up customized editing key sequences.

· Integrated programming features: the functionality of several external UNIX commands, including test , expr , getopt , and echo , has been integrated into the shell itself, enabling common programming tasks to be done more cleanly and efficiently .

· Control structures, especially the select construct, which enables easy menu generation.

· New options and variables that give you more ways to customize your environment.

· One dimensional arrays that allow easy referencing and manipulation of lists of data.

· Dynamic loading of built-ins , plus the ability to write your own and load them into the running shell.