Hi: I believe that bash 5.2 was/is held back due to incompatible Changes with 5.1 [1]. The obvious first thought would be to set BASH_COMPAT="5.1" globally and then update to the current 5.2 version. This would work for any shell which sees the BASH_COMPAT variable. User login shells, users running things which in turn invoke bash would get the variable passed down. Users who want to use the 5.2 features would have the ability to unset the variable - but recognizing the caveat below. I do see one caveat (may be others): When bash is invoked from a non-login shell without the BASH_COMPAT variable or from a tool which cleans it's env before invoking bash, those would need adjusting to set their own BASH_COMPAT variable should they depend on the 5.1 behavior or be changed to support 5.2 Which leads to: - do we have a list of tools that invoke bash but clean env variables before doing so? (pacman perhaps) - is their a task list of what needs to be done (either fix the incompatibilities or push the BASH_COMPAT variable down). - what else needs to be done to allow us to update to 5.2 Thoughts? thanks gene [1] https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/master/COMPAT