How recent are your utilities? I tried the bash version, had unexpected results - and discovered while investigating that Apple ships older versions of many CLI

How recent are your utilities? I tried the bash version, had unexpected results - and discovered while investigating that Apple ships older versions of many CLI utilities. E.g., under stock Mavericks bash, the command echo $BASH_VERSION returns 3.2.51(1)-release, while current bash is 4.2 I'm looking into homebrew as a means of getting up-to-date CLI tools. EDIT: Added homebrew using instructions on brew.sh, it managed all dependencies. Ran brew doctor, then brew install bash, edited /etc/shells as suggested, updated Terminal startup preferences (could just as easily have used chsh, 6 of one...), all was well. Quick and easy, painless.