Install Bash 5 on macOS with Patches

I recently posted an article on how to download, install, and build a macOS installer pkg for bash 5. In that first version of this post I ignored patches, minor updates to the bash source code and binary. But as the patches to bash 5 are accumulating, I cannot ignore them much longer.

This post will extend the instructions in the original post.

After downloading and expanding the bash-5.0.tar.gz, create a patches folder:

$ cd path/to/bash-5.0
$ mkdir patches
$ cd patches

You can download the patches for bash-5.0 here. As of this writing, there are seven patches for bash-5.0 labelled bash50-001 through bash50-007. You can download all at once with:

$ curl 'https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-5.0-patches/bash50-[001-007]' -O

(Adapt the numbers when there are more patches in the future.)

Then move up one directory level to the bash-5.0 root directory and apply the patches using the patch command.

$ cd ..
$ patch -p0 -i patches/bash50-001
$ patch -p0 -i patches/bash50-002

(etc.)

You can download and patch with a single step. Make sure your working directory is the bash-5.0 with all the code and run:

$ curl 'https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-5.0-patches/bash50-[001-007]' | patch -p0

From here, you can continue with the remaining build steps from the original post. The next step will be running ./configure.

The script to build the pkg installer has also been updated in the repository to download and apply the patches before building.