Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions¶
Peter Stephenson (2010/02/15)
This document contains a list of frequently-asked (or otherwise significant) questions concerning the Z-shell, a command interpreter for many UNIX systems which is freely available to anyone with FTP access. Zsh is among the most powerful freely available Bourne-like shells for interactive use.
If you have never heard of sh, csh or ksh, then you are
probably better off to start by reading a general introduction to UNIX
rather than this document.
If you just want to know how to get your hands on the latest version, skip to question Where do I get it?; if you want to know what to do with insoluble problems, go to Where do I report bugs, get more info / who’s working on zsh?.
- Introducing zsh and how to install it
- How does zsh differ from…?
- Differences from sh and ksh
- Similarities with csh
- Why do my csh aliases not work? (Plus other alias pitfalls.)
- Similarities with tcsh
- Similarities with bash
- Shouldn’t zsh be more/less like ksh/(t)csh?
- What is zsh’s support for Unicode/UTF-8?
- Why does my bash script report an error when I run it under zsh?
- What is a
namespaceanyway? - What about named references?
- What is zsh’s support for non-forking command substitution?
- Comparisons of forking and non-forking command substitution
- How to get various things to work
- Why does
$varwherevar="foo bar"not do what I expect? - In which startup file do I put…?
- What is the difference between `export’ and the
ALL_EXPORToption? - How do I turn off spelling correction/globbing for a single command?
- How do I get the Meta key to work on my xterm?
- How do I automatically display the directory in my xterm title bar?
- How do I make the completion list use eight bit characters?
- Why do the cursor (arrow) keys not work? (And other terminal oddities.)
- Why does my terminal act funny in some way?
- Why does zsh not work in an Emacs shell mode any more?
- Why do my autoloaded functions not autoload [the first time]?
- How does base arithmetic work?
- How do I get a newline in my prompt?
- Why does
bindkey ^a command-nameorstty intr ^-do something funny? - Why can’t I bind
\C-sand\C-qany more? - How do I execute command
foowithin functionfoo? - Why do history substitutions with single bangs do something funny?
- Why does zsh kill off all my background jobs when I logout?
- How do I list all my history entries?
- How does the alternative loop syntax, e.g.
while {...} {...}work? - Why is my history not being saved?
- How do I get a variable’s value to be evaluated as another variable?
- How do I prevent the prompt overwriting output when there is no newline?
- What’s wrong with cut and paste on my xterm?
- How do I get coloured prompts on my colour xterm?
- Why is my output duplicated with
foo 2>&1 >foo.out | bar? - What are these `^’ and `~’ pattern characters, anyway?
- How do I edit the input buffer in $EDITOR?
- Why does `which’ output for missing commands go to stdout?
- Why doesn’t the expansion
*.{tex,aux,pdf}do what I expect? - Why does
$RANDOMreturn the same number more than once?
- Why does
- The mysteries of completion
- Multibyte input and output
- The future of zsh
- Acknowledgments:
- Copyright Information: