Eles foram introduzidos em bash 4.0, conforme indicado no arquivo NEWS :
This is a terse description of the new features added to
bash-4.0since the release ofbash-3.2. As always, the manual page (doc/bash.1) is the place to look for complete descriptions.[...]
hh. There are new case-modifying word expansions: uppercase (
^[^]) and lowercase (,[,]). They can work on either the first character or array element, or globally. They accept an optional shell pattern that determines which characters to modify. There is an optionally- configured feature to include capitalization operators.