----------------- THE Z SHELL (ZSH) ----------------- Version ------- This is zsh version 4.2.6. This is a stable version. Installing Zsh -------------- The instructions for compiling zsh are in the file INSTALL. You should also check the file MACHINES in the top directory to see if there are any special instructions for your particular architecture. Features -------- Zsh is a shell with lots of features. For a list of some of these, see the file FEATURES, and for the latest changes see NEWS. For more details, see the documentation. Possible incompatibilities --------------------------- Since 4.2: The option SH_WORD_SPLIT, used in Bourne/Korn/Posix shell compatibility mode, has been made more like other shells in the case of substitutions of the form ${1+"$@"} (a common trick used to work around problems in older Bourne shells) or any of the related forms with the + replaced by - or = with an optional colon preceding. Previously, with SH_WORD_SPLIT in effect, this expression would cause splitting on all white space in the shell arguments. (This was always regarded as a bug but was long-standing behaviour.) Now it is treated identically to "$@". The same change applies to expressions with forced splitting such as ${=1+"$@"}, but otherwise the case where SH_WORD_SPLIT is not set is unaffected. The "unset" builtin now does not regard the unsetting of non-existent variables as an error, so can still return status 0 (depending on the handling of other arguments). This appears to be the standard shell behaviour. The variable HOME is no longer set by the shell if zsh is emulating any other shell at startup; it must be present in the environment or set subsequently by the user. It is valid for the variable to be unset. Zsh has previously been lax about whether it allows octets with the top bit set to be part of a shell identifier. With --enable-multibyte set, this is now completely disabled. This is a temporary fix until the main shell handles multibyte characters properly and the appropriate library tests can be used. This change may be reviewed if no such permanent fix is forthcoming. The completion style pine-directory must now be set to use completion for PINE mailbox folders; previously it had the default ~/mail. This change was necessary because otherwise recursive directories under ~/mail were searched by default, which could be a considerable unnecessary hit for anyone not using PINE. The previous default can be restored with: zstyle ':completion:*' pine-directory ~/mail The completion style fake-files now allows patterns as directories, for example the value '/home/*:.snapshot' is now valid. This will only cause problems in the unlikely event that a directory in the style has a pattern character in it. The default maximum function depth (configurable with --enable-max-function-depth) has been decreased to 1000 from 4096. The previous value was observed to be large enough that crashes still occurred on some fairly common PC configurations. This change is only likely to affect some highly specialised uses of the shell. The variables HISTCHARS and histchars now reject any attempt to set non-ASCII characters for history or comments. Multibyte characters have never worked and the most consistent change was to restrict the set to portable characters only. Documentation ------------- There are a number of documents about zsh in this distribution: Doc/Zsh/*.yo The master source for the zsh documentation is written in yodl. Yodl is a document language written by Karel Kubat. It is not required by zsh but but it is a nice program so you might want to get it anyway, especially if you are a zsh developer. It can be downloaded from ftp://yodl.sourceforge.net/ Doc/zsh*.1 Man pages in nroff format. These will be installed by "make install.man" or "make install". By default, these will be installed in /usr/local/man/man1, although you can change this with the --mandir option to configure or editing the user configuration section of the top level Makefile. Doc/zsh.texi Everything the man pages have, but in texinfo format. These will be installed by "make install.info" or "make install". By default, these will be installed in /usr/local/info, although you can change this with the --infodir option to configure or editing the user configuration section of the top level Makefile. Version 4.0 or above of the Texinfo tools are recommended for processing this file. Also include in the distribution are: Doc/intro.ms An introduction to zsh in troff format using the ms macros. This document explains many of the features that make zsh more equal than other shells. Unfortunately this is based on zsh-2.5 so some examples may not work without changes but it is still a good introduction. For more information, see the website, as described in the META-FAQ. If you do not have the necessary tools to process these documents, PDF, Info and DVI versions are available in the separate file zsh-doc.tar.gz at the archive sites listed in the META-FAQ. The distribution also contains a Perl script in Utils/helpfiles which can be used to extract the descriptions of builtin commands from the zshbuiltins manual page. See the comments at the beginning of the script about its usage. The files created by this script can be used by example function run-help located in the subdirectory Functions/Misc to show information about zsh builtins and run `man' on external commands. For this the shell variable HELPDIR should point to a directory containing the files generated by the helpfiles script. run-help should be unaliased before loading the run-help function. After that this function will be executed by the run-help ZLE function which is by default bound to ESC-h in emacs mode. Examples -------- Examples of zsh startup files are located in the subdirectory StartupFiles. Examples of zsh functions and scripts are located in the subdirectory Functions. Examples of completion control commands (compctl) are located in the file Misc/compctl-examples. Zsh FTP Sites, Web Pages, and Mailing Lists ------------------------------------------- The current list of zsh FTP sites, web pages, and mailing lists can be found in the META-FAQ. A copy is included in this distribution and is available separately at any of the zsh FTP sites. Common Problems and Frequently Asked Questions ---------------------------------------------- Zsh has a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) maintained by Peter Stephenson . It covers many common problems encountered when building, installing, and using zsh. A copy is included in this distribution in Etc/FAQ and is available separately at any of the zsh ftp sites. Zsh Maintenance and Bug Reports ------------------------------- Zsh is currently maintained by the members of the zsh-workers mailing list and coordinated by Peter Stephenson . Please send any feedback and bugs reports to . Reports are most helpful if you can reproduce the bug starting zsh with the -f option. This skips the execution of local startup files except /etc/zshenv. If a bug occurs only when some options set try to locate the option which triggers the bug. There is a script "reporter" in the subdirectory Util which will print out your current shell environment/setup. If you cannot reproduce the bug with "zsh -f", use this script and include the output from sourcing this file. This way, the problem you are reporting can be recreated. The known bugs in zsh are listed in the file Etc/BUGS. Check this as well as the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list before sending a bug report. Note that zsh has some features which are not compatible with sh but these are not bugs. Most of these incompatibilities go away when zsh is invoked as sh or ksh (e.g. using a symbolic link). If you send a bug report to the list and are not a subscriber, please mention this in your message if you want a response. If you would like to contribute to the development and maintenance of zsh, then you should join the zsh-workers mailing list (check the META-FAQ for info on this). You should also read the "zsh-development-guide" located in the subdirectory Util. Contributors ------------ The people who have contributed to this software project are listed in Etc/CONTRIBUTORS.