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Zsh Vs. Bash

Zsh shell is one of the most popular shells. It is also known as the “Z shell”. Although the bash shell and Zsh shell both are known as the powerful shells, they also have requirements according to the preferences that users may have.

Since both the shells are under active development, it is not sensible to be too specific here. Some of the important differences between Zsh and Bash are given below:

Zsh	Bash
Zsh provides advanced tab-completion features which are much faster and smarter (supports case insensitive completion with smart defaults).	Bash lacks some completion features comparatively to Zsh and is not as fast as Zsh.
Zsh is not installed by default in most of the Linux/UNIX machines.	Bash is a built-in shell in most of the Linux/UNIX machines, which makes it portable across different systems.
Zsh supports recursive path expansion. It means if there is only one path (let’s assume: /usr/local/bin), then we can type “cd /u/l/b” and press the tab button to access that path.	Bash does not provide support for recursive path expansion. However, there are some alternative ways like using vim or command completion (compgen -c).
Zsh has built-in spelling correction and approximate completion feature for the typing mistakes in directory names or command names.	Bash does not support spelling correction and completion features by default.
Zsh provides supports for several plugin frameworks and themes.	Bash has limited support for the plugin frameworks and themes.
In Zsh, ‘which command’ will reveal the definition of an alias, the source for a function, and the location of a command.	In Bash, ‘which command’ only reveals the location of a command.

This is how we can differentiate Zsh and Bash.

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