[ Thanks to Frank for
this link. ]
“Most developers and users of Linux come into contact with a
UNIX shell sooner or later. This is typically in the form of the
Bash shell, or sometimes the C shell, or Tcsh, or the Korn
shell(the default on IBM’s AIX operating system). They rarely come
across the Z shell which can improve the efficiency of your shell
interaction, and save some typing! And for those who are reluctant
at the prospect of having to learn “a whole new shell”, it’s worth
noting that Zsh is about as close as possible to a superset of all
those other shells, so you can get started straightaway.”
“The Z shell (“Zsh”)is usually found on the system as /bin/zsh.
If it is not already on your Linux installation, it can be obtained
from the install disks of most distributions. Alternatively it can
be downloaded from http://www.zsh.org . Incidentally, it is not
tied to Linux – the source can be successfully compiled on most
UNIX platforms, including AIX, and numerous binaries are
available.”
“All of the shell commands and settings covered in this article
can be put in a ~/.zshrc file so that they are used every time you
start an interactive shell. You can also have a ~/.zshenv file,
which is used for both interactive and non-interactive shells (for
example shell scripts). See the Zsh documentation for more details
of the Zsh startup process.”