In order to cope with having to use Windows at work I run Cygwin. My shell of choice is zsh. For whatever reason the Cygwin package of zsh installs with a series of directories that the zsh completion system deems to be insecure and it makes sure you know this. Each time a new shell is opened (in my case through a Windows native rxvt terminal) I would receive the following warning: Ignore insecure directories and continue [ny]? Pressing 'y' becomes a bit tedious after a while so I decided to track down these insecure directories and fix them. <!--more--> <tt>man zshcompsys</tt> reveals the following about the security check: > For security reasons compinit also checks if the completion system > would use files not owned by root or by the current user, or files in > directories that are world- or group-writable or that are not owned by > root or by the current user. If such files or directories are found, > compinit will ask if the completion system should really be used. To > avoid these tests and make all files found be used without asking, use > the option -u, and to make compinit silently ignore all insecure files > and directories use the option -i. This security check is skipped > entirely when the -C option is given. > > The security check can be retried at any time by running the function > compaudit. Running compaudit revealed the following: % compaudit There are insecure directories: /usr/share/zsh/site-functions /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions /usr/share/zsh /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4 Examining the permissions on these directories showed they were all group writable. % ls -ld /usr/share/zsh/site-functions drwxrwx---+ 2 wmoore mkgroup-l-d 0 Sep 4 10:54 /usr/share/zsh/site-functions Stripping them of the group write permission fixed the problem and made starting a new shell a little more pleasant. % chmod g-w /usr/share/zsh/site-functions /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4/functions /usr/share/zsh /usr/share/zsh/4.3.4 % compaudit % **Update:** _kylexlau_ provides this one line solution for correcting to permissions on each of the directories that compaudit returns: compaudit | xargs chmod g-w