Linux systems have several shells available — some more powerful than others. Perhaps the most powerful shell is zsh, the Z shell. To give you an idea of the shell’s size and complexity, the zshall man page in plain-text format weighs in at more than 16,000 lines. (Rest easy. We won’t try to cover all of zsh in this month’s column.)
Linux systems have several shells available — some more powerful than others. Perhaps the most powerful shell is zsh, the Z shell. To give you an idea of the shell’s size and complexity, the zshall man page in plain-text format weighs in at more than 16,000 lines. (Rest easy. We won’t try to cover all of zsh in this month’s column.)
By the way, if you want to use zsh occasionally, there’s no need to change your default shell to zsh. This month’s Power Tip explains how to switch shells temporarily.
Labeled Secondary Prompts
If you’ve written shell scripts, you probably know how to use loops (like for and while) and other complex commands. You may also have written multi-line commands — for instance, using echo to output several lines of text at once. All shells let you type these complex commands on a command line, as well as from a script file. But when you nest these (use one complex command “inside” another) on a command line,…
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