Thanks.  Hadn´t used that combination of options before, but learned
something new.  To bad zsh doesn´t have an option to display
the build information, but I leave it to others more qualified to say if
that
is possible or practical.

On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 12:38 PM dana <dana@dana.is> wrote:

> On 26 Jan 2019, at 12:10, Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
> wrote:
> >No, I'm afraid I can't see a better way --- the value is baked into the
> >shell but without exposing the value at the shell language level
>
> I was also going to point out that zsh itself doesn't even know anything
> about
> the 'etcdir' configure variable — the configure script uses that to build
> the
> default paths for the global rc files, all of which can be overridden
> independently, and only those complete file paths are used by zsh itself.
> So
> you can't actually trust that there's just one directory that all of them
> live
> in — though i assume that's usually the case in practice.
>
> *If* you're OK with making the following assumptions...
>
> * the files *do* all live in the same directory
> * at least one of the files exists on the system
> * the zsh in your PATH is the shell you're actually running (zsh itself
>   doesn't provide a reliable way to find the path to the running shell
> binary;
>   in some cases $ZSH_ARGZERO works well enough, but not in a script)



> ... then i guess you could do this?
>
>   etcdir=${${${(f)"$( ZDOTDIR=/dev/null zsh --source-trace -ilnpc : 2>&1
> )"}[1]#+}:h}
>

Had some trouble with the above line of code when there is only one global
file,
It only returned a ¨.¨. Assuming I typed it correctly.
The following appears to work for one or more global files.

etcdir=${${${(z)${${(f)"$( ZDOTDIR=/dev/null zsh --source-trace -ilnpc :
2>&1 )"}#+}}[1]}:h}

Hopefully no typos here either. Not sure I transitioned correctly between
array
and scalar.

It's not great though
>
> dana
>

 Again, thanks.

Jim