Everything y ou kno w from bash still applies, but zsh does a bunch of other useful things. I know that I use only a small subset of them, but t hese are especially useful for me: Extended globbing: For example, *(.) matches only regular files, not directories, whereas a*z(/) matches directories whose names start with a and end with z . There are a bunch of other things, such as ** as described by Ole Tange . Inline glob expansion: For example, type rm *.pdf and then hit tab. The glob *.pdf will expand inline into the list of .pdf files, which means you can change the result of the expansion, perhaps by removing from the command the name of one particular file you don’t want to rm . Interactive path expansion: Type cd /u/l/b and hit tab. If there is only one existing path each of whose components starts with the specified letters (that is, if only one path matches /u*/l*/b* ), then it expands in place. If there are two, say /us