zsh - $ZSH_VERSION not being printed

Question

I have a test.zsh script that contains echo $ZSH_VERSION and it outputs nothing. From the command line, echo $ZSH_VERSION prints 5.8. Is there a reason why this variable is null inside a zsh script? I am runing macOS 11.1.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65888803/zsh-version-not-being-printed

Answer 1

As pointed out in the comments, file name extensions like .zsh mean nothing to Unix shells. What matters when sourcing a script is the shebang on the first line of the script. If you want your script to be interpreted by zsh instead, then you need to put this as the first line of your script:

#!/bin/zsh