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v3.0

This is a major release that brings a significant number of changes and improvements, including a complete overhaul of the parser. Backwards compatibility is a high priority however these new features bring greater readability and consistency to shell scripting. So while the older syntax remains for compatibility, it is worth migrating over to the newer syntax for all new code being written

Breaking Changes

• Optional builtin removed: bson. This was disabled by default and likely never used. So it has been removed to reduce Murex’s testing footprint. It can easily be re-added if anyone does actually use it
• Optional builtin removed: coreutils. This was actually enabled by default for Windows builds. However rewriting Linux/UNIX coreutils for Windows support is a massive project in its own right and with the maturity of WSL there’s almost no reason to run Murex on “native Windows”. So the coreutils builtin has been dropped to allow us to focus on the responsibilities of the shell

Features

• Support for expressions, eg 5 * 5 or foobar = $foo + "bar", etc. This syntax can be used directly or specified specifically via the expr builtin
• New syntax sugar for creating JSON objects: %{ foo: bar }
• New syntax sugar for creating JSON arrays: %[ foo bar ]
• New syntax sugar for creating strings: %() (this is preferred over the, now deprecated, feature of parenthesis quotes)
• Ranges supported in [] (@[ is now deprecated)
• Support for multiline comments: /# comment #/. It is unfortunate this differs from C-style comments (/* comment */) but this has to be the case because /* is ambiguous for barewords in shells: is it a path and glob or a comment? Where as /# isn’t a common term due to # denoting a comment
• If any processes pass null as a data type across the pipe, it will be ignored. This solves the problem where functions that don’t write to stdout would still define the data type
• Config option auto-glob renamed to expand-glob, and now enabled by default
• Globbing exclusion list. This allows you to avoid annoying prompts when parameters shouldn’t be expanded as globs by the shell (eg when using regular expressions). This can be managed via shell expand-glob-unsafe-commands option in config
• @g removed. It is no longer needed with expand-glob enabled by default
• New builtin: continue: skip subsequent processes in an iteration block and continue to next iteration
• New builtin: break: exit out of a block of code (eg in an iteration loop)
• Additional syntax for index ([): *1: 1st row, *A: 1st column
• New alias: help -> murex-docs. This brings Murex a little more inline with Bash et al
• pre-cache-hint-summaries now enabled by default after testing has demonstrated it doesn’t have nearly as expensive footprint as first assumed
• Hitting TAB when nothing has been typed in the REPL will suggest past command lines
• ^ autocompletion added
• getfile writes to disk if stdout is a TTY
• mkarray (eg ja) now writes an integer array if range is integers. eg ja: [1..3]. This change wouldn’t affect a since that outputs as list of strings (for streaming performance reasons) rather than a data type aware document
• debug (method) output tweaked
• Improved error messages in a number places
• Revamped README / website landing page

Non-User Facing / Maintenance Changes

• Minimum Go version supported is now 1.17.x
• Main parser completely rewritten
• ReadArray API now requires a context.Context
• egrep references changed to grep -E to work around GNU grep deprecating support for egrep
• Added marshallers for boolean, null
• Variables.GetValue() now errors instead of returns nil when no variable set
• Additional tests. So many new tests added
• Lots of code refactoring

Bug Fixes

• regexp wasn’t erroring if nothing was matched
• readline: fixed deadlock
• append and prepend now type aware (no longer converts all arrays into string arrays)
• foreach was setting variables as strings rather than honoring their original data type
• yarn autocompletion errors should be suppressed
• spellcheck missing break causing more occasionally incorrect instances of underlined words
• config wasn’t passing data type when executing blocks via eval
• debug wasn’t setting data type when used as a function
• macro variables don’t re-prompt when the same variable is used multiple times

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Published: 31.12.2022 at 08:10

See Also

• Array Append: append: Add data to the end of an array
• Array Prepend: prepend: Add data to the start of an array
• Create JSON Array: ja: A sophisticated yet simply way to build a JSON array
• Create Streamable Array: a: A sophisticated yet simple way to stream an array or list (mkarray)
• Download File: getfile: Makes a standard HTTP request and return the contents as Murex-aware data type for passing along Murex pipelines.
• Exit Scope: break: Terminate execution of a block within your processes scope
• Expressions: expr: Expressions: mathematical, string comparisons, logical operators
• Filter By Range: [ ..Range ]: Outputs a ranged subset of data from stdin
• For Each In array: foreach: Iterate through an array
• Murex’s Offline Documentation: murex-docs: Displays the man pages for Murex builtins
• Next Iteration: continue: Terminate process of a block within a caller function
• Regex Patterns: regexp: Regexp tools for arrays / lists of strings
• Shell Configuration And Settings: config: Query or define Murex runtime settings
• index: Outputs an element from an array, map or table

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This document was generated from gen/changelog/v3.0_doc.yaml.