trapped in bash

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

So I'm setting up a new machine with Debian 64 (using Debian 32 still on 
old machine) and I'm thinking to just copy over my whole zsh install 
from here to there and ... nope ... I 'cd' to where the binary is and 
type  'zsh' and bash reports that it can't find the file.  Copy it to 
'/bin' and it still can't find it.  Even the desperate '. ./zsh' reports 
'cannot execute binary file'.  I hope to gawd that an apt-get install of 
zsh would work, but I'd like to use my existing setup exactly as is. Do 
I have to rebuild? I'm new with 64 bit issues, whatever they may happen 
to be, but I thought a 64 bit environment could always run 32 bit apps.  
Or have I forgotten something simple? Meanwhile  I'm trapped in the 
pre-fire age of bash out of the box. Even 'ls -l' doesn't work, 
filenames only.  They say that suffering purifies the soul ;-)

BTW:

     _array=( ${(f)_variable} )
     _count=$#_array   # Count the number of lines.

Can that be simplified? I don't need the _array, just the _count. Of 
course there are any number of utilities to count lines, but I mean the 
simplest zsh way, although the above is nicely self-explanatory.