On the Trail of the Z Shell

One of the most modern is the Z Shell, or zsh. Over the past few years, Linux Magazine has covered zsh at great-depth, and if you’ve ever wanted to try it, now’s the time. This zsh trail starts back in April 2002 and ends in July 2005. Along the trail, you’ll find an intro, learn how to script zsh completions, discover its many tricks, and learn about extended attributes, new file system access control lists that grant fine-grained access to files.

The July 2005, “Extended File Attributes and the Z Shell” feature is open to the public. The previous articles are available to any registered reader.

• Nine Power Tools Are Enough (April 2002)
• Making the Transition to zsh (May 2002)
• Writing Scripts for zsh (June 2002)
• Writing zsh Completion Functions (July 2002)
• Catching some ZZZ’s (February 2004)
• Extended File Attributes and the Z Shell (July 2005)

If you’re using Debian Linux and want to install zsh quickly and easily, just run…

# apt-get install zsh30

… as root. Then run /bin/zsh.

If you want to change your login shell to zsh, run…

$ chsh -s /bin/zsh