ZSH on Dos/Windows

["Luciano ES" <lucianoav@gmx.net>]

	Hi, everyone. I have been using zsh for only a couple of weeks and
haven’t had much time to work with it. So I am a newbie. I've read a lot
of the manual, but have found it difficult to find the following info:

	- I am using zsh under Win/DOS. How can I launch zsh with an argument to
determine the startup directory? I thought I could run zsh -c "cd
c:/some/dir", but then the shell is not interactive. It runs and closes
right away. Calling zsh -ic "... didn't make any difference. My specific
need is to call zsh and open a command line session from another program,
with possibly a different working directory every time it is called. My
current workaround is to have that program set the desired working
directory as the value of the $ZSHSTARTDIR environment var *then* call zsh.
Then one line in .zshrc cd’s to $ZSHSTARTDIR. Well, it works, but I find
it a little clumsy and would like to know if there is another way.

	- BTW, running zsh not interactively often doesn't work because stupid DOS
changes all the path forward slashes that there may in the command argument
into backward slashes, even though the path is inside the quotes of an
argument. By the time the argument reaches zsh, zsh cannot find the path
with backward slashes. Does anyone know how to bypass that?

	- Is it at all possible to use colors in Win/DOS? I followed all those
instructions found on the manual, but I think they only apply to Unix. I
know colors are possible in DOS, I have seen ports of GNU tools that even
change the color of the background of the DOS shell, but I have been unable
to use any color with zsh.

	- Where can I find binaries for Windows?
	I see a new version has just been released and had a look-see at the FTP
site. There are no Windows binaries there. I am using a binary distribution
I got at this site <ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh>, $ZSH_VERSION tells
me it is version 3.0.5-nt-beta-0.75 and I find it a bit too old...

	Thank you very much for any input.

--
	Luciano Espirito Santo
	Santos, SP - Brasil