shells (was: Re: [ILUG] useful tip...)

[Philip Reynolds]

kevin lyda's [kevin at suberic.net] 23 lines of wisdom included:
:>On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 01:07:58PM +0000, Charles Sharp wrote:
:>> And "~-" is shorthand for $OLDPWD.  Very useful for cp'ing, as in:
:>> 
:>> cp ~-/foo .
:>
:>awesome!  thanks!  i've been typing sh more and more in tcsh - mainly
:>for for loops and if statements, i thinks this cements it - nearly 10
:>years on and i'm finally graduating from my college shell to bash.
:>
:>before i make the switch, does anyone here use zsh?  opinions?

Yup. Use it on my RedBrick account.
Zsh is great for completion! Absolutely brilliant, bash on the other
hand being buggy as hell in places.
2 main reasons I use zsh over bash is:
1. It supports a watch variable, which enables you to "watch"
certain users logging on or off.
2. Completion control. On a system where I interact a lot with
users, completion, other than file, is handy.

Some handy one liners!

# Completes the job you are entering after the 'fg' command.
# Use like:
# fg %<TAB>
compctl -j -P "%" fg

# List all the symbolic links
alias lll='ls -l *(@)'


Some other funky features are multiple I/O redirection

echo "testing" >a >b

shell emulation, in that zsh understands for and foreach loops
brought from sh and csh respectively, as well as the way environment
variables are set (i.e. separated with a space or a colon) and even
an emulate command (man zshbuiltins).

Just some other cool things like vared (man zshbuiltins),
vared PATH
opens up a command line editor on the env var PATH.

The last one that I can think of offhand relates to the symbolic
links one, there's a list of wildcards, 

. = plain text 
@ = symbolic links
/ = directories
... (goes on and on and on, man zshexpn and go to Glob Qualifiers,
page 26/27)

Phil.