This is version 5.9 of the shell. This is a security and feature release. There are several visible improvements since 5.8.1, as well as bug fixes. All zsh installations are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.
Note in particular the changes highlighted under "Incompatibilities since 5.8.1" in COMPATIBILITY. See NEWS for more information.
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.
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.
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 https://fbb-git.github.io/yodl/
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 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.
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.
Zsh has a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) maintained by Peter Stephenson pws@zsh.org. 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 is currently maintained by the members of the zsh-workers mailing list and coordinated by Peter Stephenson coordinator@zsh.org. Please send any feedback and bugs reports to zsh-workers@zsh.org.
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.
The people who have contributed to this software project are listed in Etc/CONTRIBUTORS.