Namely, bash 4 included support for associative arrays, programmable autocompletion, a new ** glob operator, and various syntactic shortcuts. On the one hand, sticking to version 3.2, you do not get all the bug fixes and enhancements that made it into bash through versions 4 and 5. There are a number of reasons why this is not desirable at all. So, it seems that while bash has kept evolving through the years, reaching version 5.0 at the beginning of 2019, it has remained in a kind of frozen state on macOS for the last 10+ years.
In fact, the stable version of macOS at the time of this writing, macOS 10.14.5, includes bash 3.2.57, which was released in 2007.
Bash is a hugely popular Unix shell that has been distributed as the default login shell in most Linux distributions and macOS versions, up to now at least. At WWDC 2019, its official developer conference, Apple announced a number of new products, including the upcoming version of its desktop OS, dubbed macOS Catalina, which is going to replace the default command line shell bash with zsh for all newly created accounts.Īpple did not provide any rationale for their decision.
