Brash v1.2.12 Release Notes

3-Aug-2016: Updated

The enhancements described below are added to allow more clarity in the output of the .ls and the .date commands to make it easier to use them in scripts that manipulate the time.

The .ls command now has the --seconds option to cause it to print the time on the file in standard unix UTC time format -- which is as a integer representing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 (Greenich Mean Time).

The command, .ls, also supports the "--sep=string" option that lets you choose a string to separate the fields in its .ls output. When you use --sep and specify a string other an a single space, you will see a compressed output that has fewer leading blanks than if you accept the default separator of a single character string.

The .date command now has a new option, -p, that lets you specify the time to be printed. The date string is processed by the public domain function, parse_date(), into a UTC time code for use by the .date function.

A bug fix is included in this release. The source code that processes command line options. and which is used in many script functions, had a bug in the handling of processing command line options that begin with "--". This has no bearing on the getopts command which uses the older bourne-shell compatible command line parameter processing. 31-Jul-2016: Updated

Functions can now be defined using the _, :, and . characters as well well as the letters and numbers. That is underscore, colon, and dot. Previously, this caused an error message.

Also, the unset command now poperly interprets the -h and the -f options. -h gives you help, and -f lets undefine functions instead of variables.

Enhancements and message/help improvements Bug fix:

When defining functions using () instead of {} to wrap the function's body, there was a bug in the return value handling. Basically, when the function ran in a subshell, the return value got randomized. Release 1.2.10 fixed that problem. Needed Brash Enhancements and Caveats: