How to avoid parsing /etc/* files

Question

When starting my shell with e.g. exec zsh from the command line, how can I have it not parse any /etc/ files?

I read in the zsh guide that when a user starts a zsh shell, it processes the following init files in order:

# Every shell. Always
/etc/zshenv

# Every shell. Avoidable if passing flag -f to zsh
~/zshenv

# If it's a login shell.
/etc/zprofile
~/zprofile

# If it is an interactive shell
/etc/zshrc
~/zshrc

# If it is a login shell
/etc/zlogin
~/zlogin

When starting zsh, I would like to skip processing all the /etc/* files (except /etc/zshenv which I assume I can't skip as a non-root user?), and only parse my own init files in my home directory.

How can I do this when I invoke exec zsh from the command line?

Answer 1

Unset the GLOBAL_RCS option. To do this, add unsetopt GLOBAL_RCS to /etc/zshenv or $ZDOTDIR/.zshenv or run zsh -o NO_GLOBAL_RCS. Note that if $ZDOTDIR is unset, $HOME is used instead.

When GLOBAL_RCS is unset, /etc/zprofile, /etc/zshrc, /etc/zlogin and /etc/zlogout will not be sourced.