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To Z Or Not To Z

Posted by Hemos on from the that-is-the-question dept.

Blasphemous Preist writes "For all of you looking for a good religious war over shells, IBM has just posted the following article on zsh. It's very informative and comes from a strong Linux and Z-shell proponent. If you're in to hack around with something other than bash zsh may be z answer."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Zsh advocacy by oops · · Score: 5
    I'm constantly surprised that Zsh doesn't receive more attention. I guess the major headache is the lack of accessible documentation which addresses the advantages.

    I use it as my default shell everywhere I work, on both NT and Unix. Here's some of the features that I love:

    Programmable Completion
    You can define completion for different commands in different ways. eg.
    ping/telnet completes with the list of machines on my network
    man completes with my man pages
    kill completes with job numbers

    java completes with all my available Java classes (I have to provide a Perl utility to help with this (classfind) though)

    Recursive and intelligent wildcarding
    ls **/* completes through directories, subdirectories and the like. I never really have to use find anymore
    ls **/*(ah-5) finds files accessed within the last 5 hours
    ls **/*(L0) finds files of zero length
    ls **/*(@) finds symbolic links
    etc.

    Jerry Peek has quizzed the Zsh mailing lists for info so he can write about it in the next Unix Power Tools. Hopefully Zsh's profile will be raised somewhat.

  2. You Post this at 2:47AM... by PhatKat · · Score: 5

    and you're asking whether "To Z Or Not To Z"?!

    The answer is, of course, "Not To Z." It's St. Patrick's Day! Have another guinness. You have all Sunday afternoon to Z.