Installing ZSH 5.0 on CentOS 5.7

06 Mar 2013 in TIL

After installing vim and upgrading coreutils, the final piece of the puzzle was getting an up to date version of zsh installed.

I gave the version in the repos a go first, and it came back with version 4.2.6.

bash
$ sudo yum install zsh
$ zsh --version
zsh 4.2.6 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

Unfortunately, that's too old for me to use zsh-syntax-highlighting so it was time to compile from source again.

First, get and extract the files:

bash
$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/zsh/files/zsh/5.0.2/zsh-5.0.2.tar.bz2/download && tar xvjf zsh-5.0.2.tar.bz2 && cd zsh-5.0.2

Configure, make and install:

bash
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

Check that it's installed fine. It installs to /usr/local/bin/zsh:

bash
$ /usr/local/bin/zsh --version
zsh 5.0.2 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

If you want to use it as your login shell, you'll need to add it to /etc/shells:

bash
$ echo "/usr/local/bin/zsh" | sudo tee -a /etc/shells
$ chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh

Log out and back in again, and you should be running zsh version 5.0.2.