zsh 4.3.11 released

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

I've released 4.3.11 of the shell.  It's at the usual zsh web site (at
the time of writing the main files are correct but the symbolic links
haven't quite caught up; that'll just be a matter of minutes), and it's
also at Sourceforge: you'll probably get better bandwidth by waiting for
it to percolate to a mirror.  The Sourceforge links (which were working
faster for me, but note involve a redirection, so use e.g. curl -L) are

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsh/files/zsh-dev/4.3.11/zsh-4.3.11.tar.bz2/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsh/files/zsh-dev/4.3.11/zsh-4.3.11.tar.gz/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsh/files/zsh-doc-dev/4.3.11/zsh-4.3.11-doc.tar.bz2/download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsh/files/zsh-doc-dev/4.3.11/zsh-4.3.11-doc.tar.gz/download

Thanks to everyone who has helped.

The notes are fairly short:

4.3.11 contains many bug fixes and numerous minor additions; see the
NEWS file in the distribution.

Although this is on the development branch, it is believed to be fairly
stable, and is likely to become the stable release shortly.


The more interesting stuff is in the NEWS file.  Here's the top of it.

-------------------------------------
CHANGES FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF ZSH
-------------------------------------

Note also the list of incompatibilities in the README file.

Changes between versions 4.3.10 and 4.3.11
------------------------------------------

When the shell is invoked with the base name of a script, for example as
`zsh scriptname', previous versions of zsh have used the name directly,
whereas other shells use the value of $PATH to find the script.  The
option PATH_SCRIPT has been added to provide the alternative behaviour.
This is turned on where appropriate in compatibility modes.

Parameters, globbing, etc.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Parameter expansion has been enhanced to provide the ${NAME:OFFSET} and
${NAME:OFFSET:LENGTH} syntax for substrings and subarrays present in
several other shells.  OFFSET always uses zero-based indexing.  The only
clash with existing zsh syntax occurs if OFFSET begins with an
alphabetic character or `&', which is not likely.

The (D) flag in parameter expansion abbreviates directories in the
substituted value.  The (q-) flag does minimal shell quotation of arguments
for maximum human readability of the result.

The (Z) flag in parameter expansion is an enhanced version of the (z)
flag that takes an argument indicating how the string to be split
is treated. (Z:c:) parses comments as strings; (Z:C:) parses comments
and strips them; (Z:n:) treats newlines as ordinary whitespace: (z)
has always treated unquoted newlines as shell delimiters and turned them
into semicolons, though this was not previously documented.

Numeric expansion with braces has been extended so that a step may be
given, as in {3..9..2}.  The step may be negative as may the start and
end of the range (this is also new).

The glob qualifier P can be used to add a separate word before each
match.  For example, *(P:-f:) produces the command line
`-f file1 -f file2 ...'.

Regular expression matches now use the same variables for storing matched
components as shell pattern matching.  The function system now provides the
function regexp-replace for replacing text using regular expressions.  The
zle widget functions replace-string, replace-string-again, if defined with
regex in the name (e.g. "zle -N replace-regexp replace-string"), perform
regular expression matches.  In replacement text \& and \1 have the
standard meaning.

Line editor and completion
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

The completion system now has a style path-completion.  Setting this to
false inhibits completion of paths before the current path component,
e.g. /u/b/z no longer completes to /usr/bin/zsh.  This is useful on systems
where this form of completion is pathologically slow due to network
performance.

With the MULTIBYTE option, the line editor now highlights bytes in the
input that are not part of a valid character in the current locale in hex
as <XX> for hex digits X; highlighting is controlled by the "special"
keyword in the zle_highlight array.  These can be distinguished from
unprintable Unicode characters which also use "special" highlighting as the
latter are always two or four bytes long, e.g. <XXXX>, <XXXXXXXX>.

zle_highlight also controls highlighting of a removable completion
suffix, e.g. the "/" automatically appended to directories.  This uses
the keyword "suffix".

The line editor now sets the variable ZLE_LINE_ABORTED if there is
an error when editing the line.  The following code can be used
to create a bindable editor widget to restore the aborted line:
  recover-line() { LBUFFER=$ZLE_LINE_ABORTED RBUFFER=; }
  zle -N recover-line
and then either bind recover-line to a key sequence or use
`M-x recover-line <RET>'.

The parameter ZLE_STATE, available in user-defined line editor widgets,
gives information on the state of the line editor.  Currently this is
whether the line editor is in insert or overwrite mode.

Miscellaneous options
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

The new shell option HIST_LEX_WORDS causes history lines read in from
a file to be split in the same way as normal shell lines, instead of
simply on whitespace.  It's an option as although the result is more
accurate it can take a long time when the history size is large.

The shell option MONITOR can be set in non-interactive shells, and also in
subshells (as created by surrounding commands with parentheses), turning on
job control for that subshell.  The initial behaviour of a subshell is
still to turn job control off, however if the new POSIX_JOBS option is set
MONITOR remains active in subshells.

The new shell option POSIX_CD, active in emulations of POSIX-based shells,
makes the cd builtin POSIX-compatible.

The POSIX_JOBS option already referred to has various other
compatibility enchancements.

The new shell option POSIX_STRINGS makes a null character in $'...'
expansion terminate the string, as is already the case in bash.  This is
not particularly useful behaviour but may become a POSIX requirement.

The new shell option POSIX_TRAPS causes the EXIT trap to behave in the same
way as in other shells, i.e. it is only run when the shell exits.

The new shell option SOURCE_TRACE causes the shell to report files
containing shell code that the shell executes directly, i.e. startup files
or files run with the `source' or `.' builtins.

The shell option SUN_KEYBOARD_HACK has been supplemented by a more general
mechanism: the KEYBOARD_HACK variable defines the character to be ignored.

Add-on modules and function
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

The module zsh/system has a new "zsystem" builtin whose subcommands perform
system level tasks.  Currently "zsystem flock" performs advisory file
locking (for aficionados, this uses the fcntl() system call so works over
the network on Linux).  This is a particularly convenient way of locking
files for the length of a subshell.  "zsystem supports flock" provides a
test for this feature.

There is now a function system for recording and restoring recently
entered directories in a persistent fashion, with support in completion
and (if explicitly installed) dynamic directory expansion.  See the
entry for cdr in the zshcontrib manual page.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>            Software Engineer
Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070                   Cambridge Silicon Radio Limited
Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK


Member of the CSR plc group of companies. CSR plc registered in England and Wales, registered number 4187346, registered office Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road, Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, United Kingdom