On 07/07/09 08:20, William Anderson wrote:
> Alan Lord (News) wrote:
>> On 07/07/09 01:24, Sean Miller wrote:
>>> Not on my Ubuntu machine, my default user is still using bash.
>>
>> I would be surprised if the default shell is bash.
>>
>> /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash as Dave explained.
>>
>> If you look at a user's default shell in /etc/passwd you will see most
>> (if not all) point to bin/sh. (Although interestingly I note that root
>> points to bin/bash).
>
> nope, /bin/sh may have been changed to point to dash instead of bash,
> but new users are created with their shell set to bash. Every new
> account I've set up on every ubuntu box i've set up lately gets bash as
> their shell.
That's interesting. I wonder when this changed? Ubuntu was [in]famous
for it's use of dash a couple of years ago but I just created a new test
user and it's default shell is indeed bash.
Looking into /etc further however, the picture becomes somewhat cloudier...
/etc/adduser.conf specifies /bin/bash as the default login shell.
/etc/default/useradd specifies /bin/sh
# The SHELL variable specifies the default login shell on your
# system.
# Similar to DHSELL in adduser. However, we use "sh" here because
# useradd is a low level utility and should be as general
And /etc/login.defs (Which is referred to by man useradd for changing
the default behaviour of useradd) has an interesting option FAKE_SHELL
which can be used to call /bin/fakeshell first - although this is not
present on my system.
> You may all be thinking "default shell" means the shell new users are
> set with to what sh points to.
I meant default shell as the one set in /etc/passwd which is what they
are assigned when they first login.
The "default" shell is also what your shell script will point to if you
don't start the file with a #!/bin/${SHELL}.
Looking through that again, it's interesting to note that all *system*
users which require a shell are set to /bin/sh and *real* users (i.e.
actual people and root) are set to /bin/bash.
Dash *is* actually the "default" shell for Ubuntu.
"In Ubuntu 6.10, the default system shell, /bin/sh, was changed to dash"
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
The default *login* shell is bash.
Interesting little dig around that.
I also discovered the /etc/alternatives directory which is debian's way
to manage defaults when there are multiple choices such as with text
editors etc. man update-alternatives explains more.
Al
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