Centos – Can’t get ZSH working on CentOS

centoszsh

I've been using zsh for a couple of years now on Ubuntu and really like it a lot.

I've installed it on our production server as well, which is running CentOS 5.2, and it works just fine.

However, I just installed it via yum on a new VM I created to use as a development box, to replicate our production box as closely as possible.

Although yum shows that it is definitely installed (/bin/zsh) and that it is set as my shell, it does not appear to be working. Instead of creating the .zshrc and .profile files in my home directory, it created a .tcshrc file. Also, I did not receive the default configuration menu that is always displayed once you begin using ZSH, and none of the features (like advanced tab comple

Best Answer

Installing a shell on a system will not go back adn add dot-rc files to your current home directory. You can copy the defaults from /etc/skel/.zshrc or make your own. ZSH will prompt you to create a customized one on first run if none exists. If a .tcshrc file got created, I think it would only be because you ran that shell.You can see what shell you are running by executing echo $SHELL. You can change the default shell for a user to any shell installed on the system and approved in /etc/shells by executing passwd -s.

Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

zsh is for vulcans. ;-)

Seriously: bash 4.0 has some features previously only found in zsh, like ** globbing:

% ls /usr/src/**/Makefile

is equivalent to:

% find /usr/src -name "Makefile"

but obviously more powerful.

In my experience bash's programmable completion performs a bit better than zsh's, at least for some cases (completing debian packages for aptitude for example).

bash has Alt + . to insert !$

zsh has expansion of all variables, so you can use e.g.



% rm !$<Tab>


for this. zsh can also expand a command in backtics, so

% cat `echo blubb | sed 's/u/a/'`<Tab>


yields

% cat blabb


I find it very useful to expand rm *, as you can see what would be removed and can maybe remove one or two files from the commmand to prevent them from being deleted.

Also nice: using the output from commands for other commands that do not read from stdin but expect a filename:

% diff <(sort foo) <(sort bar)


From what I read bash-completion also supports completing remote filenames over ssh if you use ssh-agent, which used to be a good reason to switch to zsh.

Aliases in zsh can be defined to work on the whole line instead of just at the beginning:

% alias -g ...="../.."
% cd ...

How to make zsh completion act more like bash completion

setopt noautomenu
setopt nomenucomplete

You need both of them. If you hit tab enough times, you'll get the list of completions but it will never add any characters to what you've typed so far.

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Related Solutions

Bash – Unique Features of bash compared to zsh

How to make zsh completion act more like bash completion

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