Modifiers

Following is a list of modifiers available as of zsh-3.1.5.

NOTE:

Modifiers marked with < H > work only with history expansion.
Modifiers marked with < FP > work only with filename and parameter expansion.

h

Remove a trailing pathname component, leaving the head.

r

Remove a trailing suffix of the form `.xxx', leaving the basename

e

Remove all but the suffix

t

Remove all leading pathname components, leaving the tail

p < H >

Print the new command but do not execute it

q < H >

Quote the substituted words, escaping further substitutions

x < H >

Like q, but break into words at each blank

l

Convert the words to all lowercase

u

Convert the words to all uppercase

f < FP >

Repeats the immediately (without a colon) following modifier until the resulting word doesn't change any more.

F:expr: < FP >

Like f, but repeats only n times if the expression expr evaluates to n. Any character can be used instead of the `:', if any of `(', `[', or `{' is used as the opening delimiter the second one has to be ')', `]', or `}' respectively.

w < FP >

Makes the immediately following modifier work on each word in the string.

W:sep: < FP >

Like w but words are considered to be the parts of the string that are separated by sep. Any character can be used instead of the `:'; opening parentheses are handled specially, see above.

s/l/r[/]

Substitute r for l as described below. Unless preceded immediately by a g, with no colon between, the substitution is done only for the first string that matches l. For arrays and filename expansion, this applies to each word of the expanded text.

&

Repeat the previous s substitution. Like s, may be preceded immediately by a g. In variable expansion the & must appear inside braces, and in filename expansion it must be quoted with a backslash.

The s/l/r/ substitution works as follows.

• The left-hand side of substitutions are not regular expressions, but character strings.
• Any character can be used as the delimiter in place of `/'.
• A backslash quotes the delimiter character.
• The character `&', in the right-hand-side r, is replaced by the text from the left-hand-side l.
• The `&' can be quoted with a backslash.
• A null l uses the previous string either from the previous l or from the contextual scan string s from `!?s'.
• You can omit the rightmost delimiter if a newline immediately follows r
• the rightmost `?' in a context scan can similarly be omitted.
• Note the same record of the last l and r is maintained across all forms of expansion.