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Upgrade Bash (4.3-4.4) in a minimal (uncustomized) system - how to, and is it safe?

I have an Ubuntu server 16.04 (xenial) based Nginx server environment I host at digitalocean.com. This environment is minimalist - it has no kernel / shell customizations. I only have a few aliases in /etc/bash.bashrc, and I use only one Bash extension (WP-CLI for Wordpress sites). I rarely use any utility which is not native to Unix (CSF-LFD, Maldet, tree, zip, unzip and that's basically it).

I tried apt get update -y && apt get upgrade -y but from bash --version it seems my version is still 4.3.48(1).

I would like to upgrade that shell to it's highest version 4.4. Is it possible, and safe, in my distro and environment?

For those who wonder why it's important to me:

The reason I ask this is to successfully implement a specific solution I got as an answer in this question. Please see update_2 in that question.

Arcticooling
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    Did you give my answer a try **in that question**? – Bruce Dec 09 '17 at 09:51
  • Why not use `at now + ...`? It would be simpler than upgrading bash... – Stephen Kitt Dec 09 '17 at 09:51
  • Pull the [newer package](https://packages.ubuntu.com/artful/bash) from artful, it doesn't seem to have any dependencies over the version in xenial. I can't see how the upgrade would be an issue -- it would be _very_ surprising for any standard or commonly used features to be broken. But you could always check the [list of changes](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/plain/NEWS) if you want to know for sure – ilkkachu Dec 09 '17 at 13:04
  • No @Bruce I don't know some implementations in that answer and doesn't want something I don't know in depth as of the moment. – Arcticooling Dec 10 '17 at 08:39

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Yes, it is safe. Bash is very good in backward compatibility, the chance that anything would be broken because a shift from bash 4.3 to 4.4 is practically negligible.

On the same reason, you probably wouldn't lose too much if your bash remains on 4.3 (also the differences between 4.3 and 4.4 are negligible).

peterh
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