Z shell

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Z shell
Screenshot of a zsh session
Developed by	Peter Stephenson, et al.
Latest release	4.2.7 / December 18, 2007
Preview release	4.3.6 / April 2, 2008
OS	Various
Genre	Unix shell
License	BSD-style license
Website	http://www.zsh.org

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 of the most useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.

[edit] Origin

The first version of zsh was written by Paul Falstad in 1990 when he was a student at Princeton University. The name zsh derives from Yale professor Zhong Shao, then a teaching assistant at Princeton University. Paul Falstad thought that Shao's login name, "zsh", was a good name for a shell.

Features of note include:

Programmable command line completion that can help the user type both options and arguments for most used commands, with out-of-the-box support for several hundred commands
Sharing of command history among all running shells
Extended file globbing allows file specification without needing to run an external program such as find
Improved variable/array handling
Editing of multi-line commands in a single buffer
Spelling correction
Various compatibility modes, e.g. zsh can pretend to be a Bourne shell when run as /bin/sh
Themeable prompts, including the ability to put prompt information on the right side of the screen and have it auto-hide when typing a long command
Loadable modules, providing among other things: full TCP and Unix domain socket controls, an FTP client, and extended math functions
Fully customizable

Attesting to the sheer size of this shell is the famous first sentence of the shell's manual page, which reads "Because zsh contains many features, the zsh manual has been split into a number of sections", and then goes on to list thirteen items.