Trying to learn ... RCS and GLOBAL_RCS

[Perry Smith <pedz@easesoftware.com>]

I won’t paste the whole text here but I’m looking at the STARTUP/SHUTDOWN FILES section in zsh(1) / zshall(1) and the documentation isn’t matching what I’m seeing.  Do I need more coffee???

The man page says:

> "Both RCS and GLOBAL_RCS are set by default.”.  

Yet when I do “unsetopt” at the very top of my /etc/zshenv file, it says:

> noglobalrcs
> norcs

But I know all of my RC files and global RC files are being read — via a “trace” function I cobbled together.

I started using ZSH when Apple switched to it and I tried to read and study and learn.  This past week, I was trying to use a BSD system and my history wasn’t being saved.  Turns out Apple hid  setting of the various history zsh variables that in their /etc/zshrc and /etc/zshrc_Apple_Terminal so I never added it to my start up files.  That caused me to start digging more to fully understand things and that’s when I came up with these questions.

It is the same with logout.  On Apple (and I assume on BSD once I get the other options and variables set properly), history is being saved yet the man page says:

> "Note also that the RCS option affects the saving of history files, i.e. if RCS is unset when the shell exits, no history file will be saved.”

These are the 5.8 and 5.8.1 man pages.