Z shell

The Z shell (zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh can be thought of as an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.

Origin

Paul Falstad wrote the first version of zsh in 1990 while a student at Princeton University. The name zsh derives from the name of Yale professor Zhong Shao (then an Assistant Professor at Princeton University) — Paul Falstad regarded Shao's login-id, "zsh", as a good name for a shell. Speakers of American English pronounce "Z" as zee, so "Z shell" rhymes with "C shell", a homophone of "seashell".

Features

Features of note include: