Several new features were implemented. New "autocd", "checkjobs", and "dirspell" options were added. The new "globstar" option for special handling of '**'' was introduced. Completion was enhanced. Bash will now retry on failure to spawn children due to insufficient resources. A compatibility level for behavior as in older versions was introduced. The "-b" (socket buffer size) and "-T" (number of threads) options were added to "ulimit". A "command_not_found_handle" shell function can now be executed when a command is not found. New '&>>' and '|&' redirection operators were introduced. Many other enhancements, also to readline, were made, and bugs were fixed.
This is the third major release of bash. The features introduced in the
intermediate releases following bash-2.05 have been completed. Support
for the bash debugger (a separate project) has been integrated.