Suvarna Garge (Editor)

Z shell

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Original author(s)
  
Paul Falstad

Written in
  
C

Z shell

Developer(s)
  
Peter Stephenson, et al.

Initial release
  
1990; 27 years ago (1990)

Stable release
  
5.3.1 / December 21, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-21)

Repository
  
sourceforge.net/p/zsh/code/ci/master/tree/

The Z shell (zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.

Contents

Origin

Paul Falstad wrote the first version of zsh in 1990 while a student at Princeton University. The name zsh derives from the name of Yale professor Zhong Shao (then an Assistant Professor at Princeton University) — Paul Falstad regarded Shao's login-id, "zsh", as a good name for a shell. Speakers of American English pronounce "Z" as zee.

Features

Features include:

  • Programmable command-line completion that can help the user type both options and arguments for most used commands, with out-of-the-box support for several hundred commands
  • Sharing of command history among all running shells
  • Extended file globbing allows file specification without needing to run an external program such as find
  • Improved variable/array handling
  • Editing of multi-line commands in a single buffer
  • Spelling correction
  • Various compatibility modes, e.g. zsh can pretend to be a Bourne shell when run as /bin/sh
  • Themeable prompts, including the ability to put prompt information on the right side of the screen and have it auto-hide when typing a long command
  • Loadable modules, providing among other things: full TCP and Unix domain socket controls, an FTP client, and extended math functions.
  • The built-in where command. Works like the which command but shows all locations of the target command in the directories specified in $PATH rather than only the one that will be used.
  • Named directories. This allows the user to set up shortcuts such as ~mydir, which then behave the way ~ and ~user do.

    • A user community website called "Oh My Zsh" collects third-party extensions to the Z shell.

    References

    Z shell Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA