I don't know of a way to make zsh tell which files it would source in certain modes. There is documentation, however, that will tell you which files will be used in which mode if they exist. The zshwiki has a page, that summarises all that:<http://zshwiki.org/home/config/files> Regards, Frank.
Great, thanks a lot for your help.I would still like to make a request for a command line switch allowing to simply list the config files that were _actually_ read ( you have this thing in Python ( modules ), Perl ( modules ), Haskell ( configuration files ) , etc and I think for a product with complex configuration possibilities this is really a help for debugging ).
All that said, of course the problem I had was entirely my fault. Thanks all Peter