okay, i've been playing around with the init files that zsh uses, trying to figure out which ones get invoked when, and i think i've got it all mostly worked out; the flowchart i've made is attached to this message. i still have some questions, though. there was a thread about this maybe a year ago, wherein bart (i think) had said that the NO_RCS option was checked before the sourcing of /etc/zshrc and $ZDOTDIR/.zshrc; no matter what i've tried, however, i've been unable to to reproduce this (which my chart reflects). also, i'm not perfectly clear on what tests are done to determine whether or not a shell is a login shell and/or an interactive one. i've got those tests that i've been able to confirm empirically listed in the footnotes on my chart, but i'm sure that there are others. at the very least, the man pages state that INTERACTIVE can be set to a different value, whereas whenever i try to do so, i get an error back; similarly, the tests given in the STARTUP FILES section of the manpage for a login shell (-l or -zsh) aren't true for any of my login shells, but they are still recognized as such. so which are the tests that i'm missing? -- sweth. -- Sweth Chandramouli IS Coordinator, The George Washington University / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F) *