----------------- THE Z SHELL (ZSH) ----------------- Version ------- This is version 5.0.8 of the shell. This is a stable release. There are no significant new features since 5.0.7, but there are many bugfixes and some significant internal improvements, notably a more predictable effect for keyboard interrupts and proper parsing of $(...) expressions. 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. Note in particular the zsh/newuser module that guides new users through setting basic shell options without the administrator's intervention. This is turned on by default. See the section AUTOMATIC NEW USER CONFIGURATION in INSTALL for configuration information. 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. Incompatibilites between 5.0.7 and 5.0.8 ---------------------------------------- Various arithmetic operations have changed, in particular with respect to the choice of integer or floating point operations. The new behaviour is intended to be more consistent, but is not compatible with the old. 1) Previously, the modulus operation, `%', implicitly converted the operation to integer and output an integer result, even if one or both of the arguments were floating point. Now, the C math library fmod() operator is used to implement the operation where one of the arguments is floating point. For example: Old behavour: % print $(( 5.5 % 2 )) 1 New behaviour: % print $(( 5.5 % 2 )) 1.5 2) Previously, assignments to variables assigned the correct type to variables declared as floating point or integer, but this type was not propagated to the value of the expression, as a C programmer would naturally expect. Now, the type of the variable is propagated so long as the variable is declared as a numeric type (however this happened, e.g. the variable may have been implicitly typed by a previous assignment). For example: Old behaviour: % integer var % print $(( var = 5.5 / 2.0 )) 2.75 % print $var 2 New behaviour: % integer var % print $(( var = 5.5 / 2.0 )) 2 % print $var 2 3) Previously, the FORCE_FLOAT option only forced the use of floating point in arithmetic expressions for integer constants, i.e. numbers typed directly into the expression, but not for variables. Hence an operation involving only integer variables (or string variables containing integers) was not forced to be performed with floating point arithmetic. Now, operations involving variables are also forced to floating point. For example: Old behaviour: % unsetopt FORCE_FLOAT % print $(( 1 / 2 )) 0 % integer i=1 j=2 % print $(( i / j )) 0 % setopt FORCE_FLOAT % print $(( 1 / 2 )) 0.5 % print $(( i / j )) 0 New behaviour: % unsetopt FORCE_FLOAT % print $(( 1 / 2 )) 0 % integer i=1 j=2 % print $(( i / j )) 0 % setopt FORCE_FLOAT % print $(( 1 / 2 )) 0.5 % print $(( i / j )) 0.5 Incompatibilities between 5.0.2 and 5.0.5 ----------------------------------------- The "zshaddhistory" hook mechanism documented in the zshmisc manual page has been upgraded so that a hook returning status 2 causes a history line to be saved on the internal history list but not written to the history file. Previously any non-zero status return would cause the line not to be saved on the history at all. It is recommended to use status 1 for this (indeed most shell users would naturally do so). Incompatibilities between 5.0.0 and 5.0.2 ----------------------------------------- In 5.0.0, the new "sticky" emulation feature was applied to functions explicitly declared within an expression following `emulate ... -c', but did not apply to functions marked for autoload in that expression. This was not documented and experience suggests it was inconvenient, so in 5.0.2 autoloads also have the sticky property. In other words, emulate zsh -c 'func() { ... }' behaves the same way in 5.0.0 and 5.0.2, with the function func always being run in native zsh emulation regardless of the current option settings. However, emulate zsh -c 'autoload -Uz func' behaves differently: in 5.0.0, func was loaded with the options in effect at the point where it was first run, and subsequently run with whatever options were in effect at that point; in 5.0.2, func is loaded with native zsh emulation options and run with those same options. This is now the recommended way of ensuring a function is loaded and run with a consistent set of options. Note that the command `autoload -z' has never affected the options applied when the function is loaded or run, only the effect of the KSH_AUTOLOAD option at the point the function is loaded. Possible incompatibilities between 4.2 and 5.0 ---------------------------------------------- Here are some incompatibilities in the shell since the 4.2 series of releases. It is hoped most users will not be adversely affected by these. In previous releases of the shell, builtin commands and precommand modifiers that did not accept options also did not recognize the argument "--" as marking the end of option processing without being considered an argument. This was not documented and was incompatible with other shells. All such commands now handle this syntax. The configuration option --enable-lfs to enable large file support has been replaced by autoconf's standard --enable-largefile mechanism. As this is usually used whenever necessary, this won't usually be noticeable; however, anyone configuring with --disable-lfs should configure with --disable-largefile instead. The configuration option --with-curses-terminfo has been replaced by the option --with-term-lib="LIBS" where LIBS is a space-separated list of libraries to search for termcap and curses features. 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. Debug traps (`trap ... DEBUG' or the function TRAPDEBUG) now run by default before the command to which they refer instead of after. This is almost always the right behaviour for the intended purpose of debugging and is consistent with recent versions of other shells. The option DEBUG_BEFORE_CMD can be unset to revert to the previous behaviour. Previously, process substitutions of the form =(...), <(...) and >(...) were only handled if they appeared as separate command arguments. (However, the latter two forms caused the current argument to be terminated and a new one started even if they occurred in the middle of a string.) Now all three may be followed by other strings, and the latter two may also be preceded by other strings. Remaining limitations on their use (to reduce incompatibilities to a minimum) are documented in the zshexpn.1 manual. In previous versions of the shell it was possible to use index 0 in an array or string subscript to refer to the same element as index 1 if the option KSH_ARRAYS was not in effect. This was a limited approximation to the full KSH_ARRAYS handling and so was not very useful. In this version of the shell, this behaviour is only provided when the option KSH_ZERO_SUBSCRIPT is set. Note that despite the name this does not provide true compatibility with ksh or other shells and KSH_ARRAYS should still be used for that purpose. By default, the option is not set; an array subscript that evaluates to 0 returns an empty string or array element and attempts to write to an array or string range including only a zero subscript are treated as an error. Writes to otherwise valid ranges that also include index zero are allowed; hence for example the assignment array[(R)notfound,(r)notfound]=() (where the string "notfound" does not match an element in $array) sets the entire array to be empty, as in previous versions of the shell. KSH_ZERO_SUBSCRIPT is irrelevant when KSH_ARRAYS is set. Also as in previous versions, attempts to write to non-existent elements at the end of an array cause the array to be suitably extended. This difference means that, for example array[(R)notfound]=(replacement) is an error if KSH_ZERO_SUBSCRIPT is not set (new behaviour), while array[(r)notfound]=(replacement) causes the given value to be appended to the array (same behaviour as previous versions). The "exec" precommand modifier now takes various options for compatibility with other shells. This means that whereas "exec -prog" previously tried to execute a command name "-prog", it will now report an error in option handling. "exec -- -prog" will execute "-prog". If the option EQUALS is set, as it is by default in zsh's native mode, "exec =-prog" behaves the same way in all versions of zsh provided the command can be found. 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 BAUD is no longer set automatically by the shell. In previous versions it was set to the baud rate reported by the terminal driver in order to initialise the line editor's compensation mechanism for slow baud rates. However, the baud rate so reported is very rarely related to the limiting speed of screen updates on modern systems. Users who need the compensation mechanism should set BAUD to an appropriate rate by hand. 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. If the shell starts in a mode where it is emulating another shell (typically because the base name of the shell was "sh" or another known shell), the "repeat" syntax is not available by default, to avoid clashes with external commands, but the "ulimit" command is available by default. "limit", "sched" and "unlimit" are not available by default in such modes: this has been the case for many versions but is now documented for the first time. (Users should note that emulation modes are not designed for backwards compatibility with previous versions of zsh, but to maximise compatibility with other shells, hence it is not safe to assume emulation modes will behave consistently between zsh versions.) Parameter substitutions in the form ${param//#%search/replace} match against "search" anchored at both ends of the parameter value. Previously this syntax would have matched against "%search", anchored only at the head of the value. The form ${param//#$search/replace} where the value $search starts with "%" considers the "%" to be part of the search string as before. Configure attempts to decide if multibyte characters are supported by the system and if so sets the effect of --enable-multibyte, unless --disable-multibyte was passed on the command line. When --enable-multibyte is in effect, the MULTIBYTE shell option is on by default; this causes many operations to recognise characters in the current locale. (Most typically this is used for a UTF-8 character set but the shell will work with any character set provided by the system where individual octets are either US ASCII characters or have the top bit set.) Older versions of the shell always assumed a character was one byte; this remains the case if --disable-multibyte is in effect or if the MULTIBYTE option is unset. In some places the width of characters will be taken into account where previously a raw string length was used; this is transparent in calculations of screen position, but also occurs, for example, in calculations of padding width. Note that MULTIBYTE is not automatically set when emulating Bourne- and POSIX-style shells; for interactive use of these emulations it may be necessary to set it by hand. Note also that the option COMBINING_CHARS is not set by default due to difficulties detecting the ability of the terminal to display combining characters correctly; MAC users in particular will probably wish to set this option. Zsh has previously been lax about whether it allows octets with the top bit set to be part of a shell identifier. Older versions of the shell assumed all such octets were allowed in identifiers, however the POSIX standard does not allow such characters in identifiers. The older behaviour is still obtained with --disable-multibyte in effect. With --enable-multibyte in effect (see previous paragraph) there are three possible cases: MULTIBYTE option unset: only ASCII characters are allowed; the shell does not attempt to identify non-ASCII characters at all. MULTIBYTE option set, POSIX_IDENTIFIERS option unset: in addition to the POSIX characters, any alphanumeric characters in the local character set are allowed. Note that scripts and functions that take advantage of this are non-portable; however, this is in the spirit of previous versions of the shell. Note also that the options must be set before the shell parses the script or function; setting them during execution is not sufficient. MULITBYTE option set, POSIX_IDENTIFIERS set: only ASCII characters are allowed in identifiers even though the shell will recognise alphanumeric multibyte characters. The sched builtin now keeps entries in time order. This means that after adding an entry the index of an existing entry used for deletion may change, if that entry had a later time than the new entry. However, deleting a entry with a later time will now never change the index of an entry with an earlier time, which could happen with the previous method. 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 small 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. Writers of add-on modules should note that the API has changed significantly to allow user control of individual features provided by modules. See the documentation for zmodload -F and Etc/zsh-development-guide, in that order. 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 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 included 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 Etc. Contributors ------------ The people who have contributed to this software project are listed in Etc/CONTRIBUTORS.