mikas blog

The “Directory specific shell configuration with Zsh” is a rocking feature I use in all my projects when working on the command line. I just created a screencast where I’m showing this feature in action, including its configuration: This embedded video doesn’t work for you? Try heading over to YouTube. Since its my first screencast […]

I was giving a skills exchange session about Zsh at DebConf 11. I wasn’t expected to prepare the session, but since there was no video projector available in the meeting room I started to work on some notes. Looks like I suffer from presentation driven development, so the notes turned out to become bigger than […]

Now being an official Debian developer I’ve the possibility to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org for my Debian packages. But whereas I want to use that for all my official Debian packages I still want to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org for my grml related packages. I’m a lazy sysadmin and don’t want to manually adjust my changelogs depending on the […]

The advent calendar started with a Zsh tip, let’s end the advent calendar session with a Zsh tip: globbing. Globbing is like pattern matching. When running ‘ls *.txt’ you’re using globbing. But the globbing feature inside Zsh is much more powerful. Quoting the H-Glob function (“help globbing”) of grml’s Zsh configuration: % H-Glob / directories […]

One of the reasons why Zsh rocks so much is its completion system. Tab, tab, tab…. Using default Zsh without an useful configuration? Then start with loading the completion system: autoload -U compinit && compinit Now check out the completion system with tools that provide lots of options, like for example gpg and rsync. Then […]

Frank Terbeck, a grml developer, implemented vcs_info for the Zsh. vcs_info is a nice and flexible system for providing version control information information within the Zsh prompt. It provides support for bzr, cdv, cvs, darcs, git, hg, mtn, p4, svk, svn and tla. vcs_info is available since zsh-beta, version 4.3.6-dev-0+20080929-1 or later and using the […]

If you want to become a Zsh poweruser you should make sure to effectively use keybindings. First of all: use ‘bindkey -e’ to to enable emacs style or ‘bindkey -v’ for vi style. If you don’t know what you should prefer: use emacs style. Execute ‘bindkey’ to get a list of currently active key bindings […]

Someone asked me to provide Zsh tips as kind of an advent calendar in my blog. I like the idea but don’t want to restrict it to Zsh only but instead provide hints that might be interesting in general for the readers of my blog. So there we go… Of course let’s start with the […]

If there’s something that I was missing in Zsh compared to Bash I’d say it’s bashdb – the Bash Debugger. But thanks to Rocky Bernstein we have zshdb – the debugger for Zsh scripts! :) The command syntax generally follows that of the GNU debugger gdb, and as zshdb just entered Debian/unstable (needs a very […]

Das Buch “Zsh – Die magische Shell” von Julius Plenz und Sven Guckes (ISBN-13: 978-3937514598) ist frisch erschienen. Ich habe eine Vorabversion als PDF erhalten und nachdem jetzt auch die Hardcopy-Version auf meinem Schreibtisch liegt, möchte ich als Zsh-Liebhaber natürlich was dazu schreiben. Das Zsh-Buch von Julius und Sven ist die erste deutsche Dokumentation zu […]

Ever wanted to insert a character in your terminal but don’t have a keybinding for that character? zsh provides a nifty feature called insert-unicode-char: autoload insert-unicode-char zle -N insert-unicode-char bindkey ‘^Xi’ insert-unicode-char Figure out the character’s code (take a look at unicode.org/charts/ for example) and press ‘ctrl-x i’, followed by the character’s code and press […]

My notes/slides from the zsh-workshop I held yesterday at Medienkunstlabor Graz are available online: zsh-workshop notes

% cat > zsh-workshop.txt << EOF Was: Zsh-Workshop Wann: Dienstag, 28. November 2006, 20 Uhr [OpenEnd] Wo: Medienkunstlabor (Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz) Wer: Michael Prokop [mika (at) grml.org] Eintritt: Frei Details zum Workshop: Zsh? “Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language.” — http://www.zsh.org/ Einführung in das […]

Stephen ‘caphuso’ Rueger gave an irctalk about the zsh on 10th of september. As I forgot to mention it in my blog and missed the talk itself I now read the log. It’s a nice introduction to the zsh and covers interesting topics of the zsh – read yourself why you should use the zsh. […]

My blog looked like dead in the last few days, I know. Sorry for that, but my load was and still is quite high again. ;-( In the last few days I set up my own rootserver. Apache, Apache-SSL, MySQL, Courier and Postfix are doing their job now. If you can read this message it […]

zsh-users out there: please use the zsh as your /bin/sh! Use /bin/zsh not only as the shell for your user(s) in /etc/passwd but also do a ‘ln -s /bin/zsh /bin/sh’! Why? For me there are two major reasons: * find unportable shellscripts * find bugs of zsh grml uses zsh as the default shell. I […]

One thing that annoyed me at my selfcompiled zsh-binary was that zsh changed path to ‘/’ when starting up. Now I could fix that behaviour: $ echo $CFLAGS -O9 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 \ -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-exceptions -malign-double $ ls -lah Src/zsh| awk ‘{print $5}’ 566K $ ./Src/zsh -f -c pwd / […] $ echo $CFLAGS […]

An absolutely great zsh-tip by Jesper Holmberg I would like to share with you because I find it very useful. The motivation for the following snippet is the fact that I often do a ‘find’ or a ‘locate’ to find some files I’m interested in, and then want to do some action on one of […]

Absolutely great. Jerry Peek (you might know him from the absolutely great book Unix Power Tools), Oliver Kiddle (a well known zsh-geek) and Stephenson Peter (author of the well known zsh-users-guide) have written a book on zsh named “From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line” (book@amazon.at). It will be available in November 2004. […]

Currently I’m building my own chroot-environment. Now I’ve a static zsh from cvs-tree: [mika@tweety(519): ~/Source/zsh-cvs-040803/zsh]$ ldd Src/zsh not a dynamic executable 1 [mika@tweety(520): ~/Source/zsh-cvs-040803/zsh]$ Now I’m trying to modify my zsh-setup so it works without any more modifications out of the box in the chroot-environment. In a chroot you’ll probably find no GNU-date so I […]