On 2008-05-06 at 17:55 +0100, martin f krafft wrote: > What, if I may ask, is the purpose of zsh/files? If I correctly recall the gist of a verbal conversation about 11 years ago with the author, in a university environment with heavily multi-user systems which were often abused by people writing My First Fork Bomb, it was to have the availability to load in sufficient builtins to make it easier to deal with systems which won't let you fork() anymore more; to do basic recovery work and have the commands available; to avoid fork() overheads when dealing with a loaded single-CPU Solaris box, etc. But mostly, IIRC, to build a static version of the shell with the module already loaded, to put on a boot/recovery diskette and so reduce what was needed. It pre-dates busybox, which has since become the common way of doing this. It wasn't intended to provide full versions of the commands, the commands which are there don't implement all the POSIX options, etc. It's intended to provide enough to be useful in emergencies. Most people shouldn't need to use it. Mind, it's availability was one of the factors which led to the author successfully convincing me to switch shells to zsh. :^) There were times when it _really_ mattered. It's probably worth adding a note to the documentation that the implementations are not complete (for Standards compliance) and that the module should probably only be loaded for emergency recovery situations; loading it for routine use is premature over-optimisation. -Phil
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