Z shell

Z shell

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

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 can be thought of as an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash,ksh, and tcsh.

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, so "Z shell" rhymes with "C shell", ahomophone of "seashell".

Features:

Features of note 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 a 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. 

For more information, please visit : www.programmingyan.com