SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes

Using chsh

In our discussion of shells earlier in this book, we have talked many times about either what shell you are using or what shell prompt commands you can perform. We have also touched on why you may want to change your shell, and now we will cover how to do just that within your Unix environment.

In the beginning of this book, you learned that there are a variety of different shells that you can run; we covered most if not all of them. There will be times when you will want to change your shell, and to do that, you can use the change shell command, or chsh. The chsh command will allow you to choose one of the shells that is registered for use on your machine. This means that you must have a shell on your system in order to request it. ...