How do I reload ZSH config files without replacing the current shell?
<p>How do I tell ZSH to reload itself, as if it's a freshly invoked shell, but without losing the history?</p>

<p>The context for this is that I've spent a long time building my ZSH setup, and I'd hate to lose it if my current machine fails, or the drive gets corrupted, etc.  To this end, I've put all my local ZSH config files in a git repository.  Nothing new so far.</p>

<p>But now I want to add an 'install' script to the repository, to ease the process of installing my setup on a new machine.  Once the files are installed (actually, symlinks created in ${ZDOTDIR-~} that point to the files in the repository), I want the script to reload them, without replacing the current process via exec (and therefore losing the history), and without sourcing the files one-by-one (and risking the possibility that I may load them in the wrong order or miss some other part of the ZSH startup process).</p>

<p>Is there some facility built in to ZSH, or some other way to tell it to reload everything, as if it was a freshly started instance, while preserving the command history?</p>

<p>EDIT:  Hah. Um.. hrm.. of course, I've now wiped out my .zshrc and .zlogin, Though the latter is no great hardship (It just had RVM's setup in it, which is easily recovered).  The former, however, <em>hurts</em>.  Anyone who can tell me how to <em>recover</em> a .zshrc from a shell that has sourced it gets all my super bonus points.  An answer to the original question will still be marked as accepted, of course.  </p>

<p><em>I had a problem.  I wrote a shell script.  <a href="http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247" rel="noreferrer">Now I have two problems</a></em> :)</p>