Discovering what shell you're using

When you first log in to your UNIX account, you'll be using the default shell on your system. The default shell, its features, and its options depend completely on what your system administrator specifies. Code Listings 3.1 and 3.2 show examples of how default shell prompts differ on two different systems.

To discover what shell you're using:

  • echo $SHELL
    At your shell prompt, type echo $SHELL (capitalization counts!). This command tells UNIX to display (echo) information about shell settings. This information, by the way, is part of the environment variables, so the technical phrasing (which you might hear in UNIX circles) is to "echo your shell environment variable." The system's response will be the full ...

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