December 2025
Intermediate to advanced
704 pages
15h 22m
English
Content preview from Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible, 5th Edition
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Chapter 23The zsh Shell
While the Bash shell is by far the most popular shell used in Linux, it’s not the only shell available. As with just about everything in Linux, there’s more than one way to do things. This chapter takes a look at one of the the newer shells, the zsh shell. The zsh shell provides some amazing features and sets the bar pretty high for any future shell development. This chapter discusses what makes the zsh shell so unique and walks through the various features available in your zsh shell scripts.
History of the zsh Shell
The zsh shell is an open-source UNIX shell developed by Paul Falstad. It takes ideas from the Bourne, Bash, and tcsh shells and adds many unique features to create a full-blown advanced shell designed for programmers. Some of the features that make the zsh shell unique include:
- Improved shell option handling
- Shell compatibility modes
- Loadable modules
Of all these, the loadable modules feature is the most advanced thought in shell design. As you’ve seen in the previous shell chapters, each shell contains a set of built-in commands that are available without the need of external utility programs. The benefit of built-in commands is execution speed. The shell doesn’t have to load a utility program into memory before running it; the built-in commands are already in the shell memory, ready to go.
The zsh shell provides a core set ...
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