Bash or Bash2: What's the difference?

[rbrimhall]

Just curious as to what the difference is between these two shells: I found info on bash but not on bash2... which to use?

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I'm moving this one to Software Related. Bash is a piece of software, last time I checked!

But, it could just be a difference in the version of software. I'm no programmer, but I do remember some distros giving you the options of bash1 and bash, which was bash 2.0x something.

Like I said, I don't know specifically why it's there, but there could be some obscure differences in the way bash and bash2 handle certain shell builtins, or how they execute shell scripts. If you have a mission critical shell script that runs on the older version of bash, then of course you'll want to have that version available...

[rbrimhall]

I wasn't sure where this would go so I posted to /dev/random... thanks for the answer. I've been messing around with both of them but don't notice any real difference so far.

[Hayl]

the current verion of bash is 2.x

bash is now normally just a symlink to bash2 if the bash executable gets installed as bash2 on your distro.

[rbrimhall]

ahhh, thx Hayl!

[mdwatts]

And /bin/sh is a symlink from either /bin/bash or /bin/bash2.