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What are .zsh related files and why are they seen in Home folder?

Why am I seeing folders and files related to .zsh at the top of my Home folder in Finder on MacBook Pro 14"? The folders and some of the files are grayed out. Most were created on a specific date and have not been modified. I am a run-of-the-mill, but long term user of MacBook Pro. I have never seen files in the Home folder like this before. What are .zsh related files and why are they in the Home folder? Thanks in advance for input.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Jul 17, 2023 5:19 AM

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4 replies

Jul 17, 2023 2:26 PM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks for responding. These are the hidden files that were being shown. The only file here that has a later modified date is Ipoptions which may not be related to Zsh shell. Were you saying that .zsh_history and .zsh_sessions files would need to be deliberately created or deliberately created in (or put in) the home directory? I won't take up more of community time. I'll just use your suggestion to re-hide hidden files (which I tried and does work) and assume these are all good and necessary files that a user who has almost never used Terminal doesn't need to see. Of course, any other comments are welcome if anything looks bizarre here.

Jul 17, 2023 2:37 PM in response to crazywoman1

If zsh is your shell (which it seems to be), then when you launch macOS Terminal, it would start zsh to give you a command prompt, and zsh would create .zsh_history and .zsh_sessions.


However, any other .zsh* files (eg. .zshrc, .zprofile, .zshenv, .zlogin), would have had to be manually created, or an install process for some terminal based command or utility might create one of the .zsh* files because it needs to specify some setup information that needs to be run every time you start a macOS Terminal session.

What are .zsh related files and why are they seen in Home folder?

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