For a project I'm maintaining I've written a release script, after bodging one too many releases. For this, I came up with this helpful little snippet to increment version numbers.
inc_version() {
awk -F. -vOFS=. '{ $ver++; while(ver++<NF) $ver=0; print $0 }' ver=$1
}You just give it a version number on stdin, tell it which part you need incremented, and you'll get it properly changed on stdout. Fields right of the one given get zeroed out.
echo "1.2.3" | inc_version 3 1.2.4 echo "1.2.3" | inc_version 2 1.3.0 echo "1.2.3" | inc_version 1 2.0.0
If your version number ends on a build- or version control identifier, just replace NF with NF-1, so the zeroing stops one field short.