Jobs in command position

[danielshahaf]

The various percent syntaxes for referring to a job (https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Jobs-_0026-Signals.html#Jobs) can be used in command position to foreground that job:

% cat & 
[1] 9896
% 
[1]  + suspended (tty input)  cat
% %cat
[1]  + continued  cat

In the example, %cat should be green, even if there's no alias/function/builtin of that name.

Cf. https://zsh.org/users/27806 (user ran into this in zsh upstream).

[thisisrandy]

It's possible to work around this using the regexp highlighter. Here's a rough cut:

ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_HIGHLIGHTERS+=(regexp)
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_REGEXP+=('^%\S*' fg=green)

[SumathiD20]

cat &: The cat command is run in the background. The & at the end of the command tells Zsh to run the command in the background.
In Zsh, syntax highlighting (e.g., using plugins like zsh-syntax-highlighting) can be configured to recognize job control commands like % and highlight them.

Referenced (https://zsh.org/users/27806) likely involves a scenario where the user expected %cat to be highlighted

ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[jobs]='fg=green'