August 2011
Beginner to intermediate
600 pages
14h 29m
English
Content preview from Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash, and More
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
The Z Shell
The Z shell (zsh) was written by Paul Falstad in 1990. It was intended to be a ksh-like shell but also included some csh-like features because csh was a very popular interactive shell in the 1970s and 1980s. It is particularly good as an interactive shell. It does not claim full POSIX or Bourne compatibility, which allows it greater flexibility to add new features, although it does aim to be ksh compatible. It can change its behavior with the emulate command, or if called as /bin/sh or /bin/ksh, to act more like those shells.
Zsh is a lot like bash for interactive use, with similar, although in some ways more featureful, history recall and command completion. The compctl command can be used to customize just how the completion works. Globbing syntax is slightly different from ksh and Bourne shell, and arrays are indexed from 1, not 0.