Z shell

Z shell

Screenshot of a zsh session
Original author(s)	Paul Falstad
Developer(s)	Peter Stephenson, et al.
Initial release	1990; 27 years ago (1990)
Stable release	5.3 / December 12, 2016; 2 months ago (2016-12-12)
Repository	sourceforge.net/p/zsh/code/ci/master/tree/
Written in	C
Operating system	Various
Type	Unix shell
License	MIT-like
Website	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 is an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.

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" is allophonous with "C shell", which in turn is a homophone of "seashell".

Features include:

A user community website called "Oh My Zsh" collects third-party extensions to the Z shell.