Bash Reference Manual

Reference Documentation for Bash

Edition 4.3, for `Bash` Version 4.3.

February 2014

Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University
Brian Fox, Free Software Foundation

This text is a brief description of the features that are present in the Bash shell (version 4.3, 2 February 2014).

This is Edition 4.3, last updated 2 February 2014, of The GNU Bash Reference Manual, for Bash, Version 4.3.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

Bash Features

This text is a brief description of the features that are present in the Bash shell (version 4.3, 2 February 2014). The Bash home page is http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/.

This is Edition 4.3, last updated 2 February 2014, of The GNU Bash Reference Manual, for Bash, Version 4.3.

Bash contains features that appear in other popular shells, and some features that only appear in Bash. Some of the shells that Bash has borrowed concepts from are the Bourne Shell (‘sh’), the Korn Shell (‘ksh’), and the C-shell (‘csh’ and its successor, ‘tcsh’). The following menu breaks the features up into categories, noting which features were inspired by other shells and which are specific to Bash.

This manual is meant as a brief introduction to features found in Bash. The Bash manual page should be used as the definitive reference on shell behavior.

1 Introduction		An introduction to the shell.
2 Definitions		Some definitions used in the rest of this manual.
3 Basic Shell Features		The shell "building blocks".
4 Shell Builtin Commands		Commands that are a part of the shell.
5 Shell Variables		Variables used or set by Bash.
6 Bash Features		Features found only in Bash.
7 Job Control		What job control is and how Bash allows you to use it.
• Command Line Editing		Chapter describing the command line editing features.
• Using History Interactively		Command History Expansion
8 Installing Bash		How to build and install Bash on your system.
Appendix A Reporting Bugs		How to report bugs in Bash.
Appendix B Major Differences From The Bourne Shell		A terse list of the differences between Bash and historical versions of /bin/sh.
Appendix C GNU Free Documentation License		Copying and sharing this documentation.
Appendix D Indexes		Various indexes for this manual.

This document was generated on February 28, 2014 using texi2html 5.0.

Bash Reference Manual

Reference Documentation for Bash

Edition 4.3, for Bash Version 4.3.

February 2014

Bash Features

Edition 4.3, for `Bash` Version 4.3.