Patching and building bash is just a horrible experience. You have to download the base version and all patches separate, and then apply each patch one by one.

Patching and building bash is just a horrible experience. You have to download the base version and all patches separate, and then apply each patch one by one. Some patches even expect different base directories than others (e.g. "bash-20120427", "bash-4.2-patched", "bash-4.2.47"), it's completely inconsistent. I made a quick and dirty Makefile to automate this, and then found out that bash doesn't link properly on my other system :-( On my Fedora laptop I can't even apply the patches, because GNU (!) patch doesn't accept "../" in paths anymore: "Ignoring potentially dangerous file name ../bash-4.2-patched/subst.h". If anybody still cares, here's the Makefile: https://gist.github.com/andreasf/3d508a59432476614b71 https://gist.github.com/andreasf/3d508a59432476614b71 It's for Bash 4.2 (current is 4.3.x), and it downloads and executes stuff from Github, so take care.