The Z Shell Guide

This document has been produced from the texinfo file `zsh.texi', included in the `Doc' sub-directory of the Zsh distribution.

Origins

The texinfo guide was originally put together by Jonathan Hardwick, jch@cs.cmu.edu, who converted the `zsh.1' file distributed with zsh v2.5.0. After a period of neglect it was updated by Clive Messer, clive@epos.demon.co.uk to reflect the many changes made to both the shell, the original `zsh.1', (which due to its size and ever increasing number of options has since been split into several man-pages: `zsh.1', `zshall.1', `zshbuiltins.1', `zshcompctl.1', `zshcompctl.1', `zshexpn.1', `zshmisc.1', `zshoptions.1', `zshparam.1', `zshzle.1'), and also now includes other useful information from the META-FAQ.

Producing documentation from zsh.texi.

Whilst this guide for the most part duplicates the man-pages, (suitably marked-up into texinfo), and is not intended to replace them, it does offer several advantages over them, not least that the texinfo source may be converted into several formats, e.g.,

The Info guide.

The Info format allows searching for topics, commands, functions, etc. from the many Indices. The command makeinfo zsh.texi is used to produce the Info documentation.

The printed guide.

The command texi2dvi zsh.texi will output `zsh.dvi' which can then be processed with dvips and optionally gs (Ghostscript) to produce a nicely formatted printed guide.

The html guide.

Mark Borges, mdb@cdc.noaa.gov, maintains an html version of this guide at http://www.mal.com/zsh/Doc/zsh_toc.html.
(The html version is produced with texi2html, which may be obtained from http://wwwcn.cern.ch/dci/texi2html/. The command is, texi2html -split_chapter -expandinfo zsh.texi)

For those who do not have the necessary tools to process texinfo, precompiled documentation, (PostScript, dvi, info and html formats), is available from the zsh archive site or its mirrors in the file, `zsh-doc.tar.gz'. (See section Availability, for a list of sites.)

Future

This guide is actively maintained by Clive Messer, clive@epos.demon.co.uk, and Mark Borges, mdb@cdc.noaa.gov. Patches, comments, criticism, and suggestions should be sent to either of the above or alternatively, the zsh-workers mailing list, zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu.

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