From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Oct 19 13:22:57 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 59F3C16A4E1 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:22:57 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-questions@m.gmane.org) Received: from ciao.gmane.org (main.gmane.org [80.91.229.2]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93C0F43DD2 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:21:10 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from freebsd-questions@m.gmane.org) Received: from list by ciao.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.43) id 1GaXoy-0004O5-7X for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:20:28 +0200 Received: from c-24-147-85-158.hsd1.ma.comcast.net ([24.147.85.158]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:20:28 +0200 Received: from jdarnold by c-24-147-85-158.hsd1.ma.comcast.net with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:20:28 +0200 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: Jonathan Arnold Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 09:20:14 -0400 Lines: 22 Message-ID: References: <200610191303.k9JD322j081114@dc.cis.okstate.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: c-24-147-85-158.hsd1.ma.comcast.net User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 (X11/20060804) In-Reply-To: <200610191303.k9JD322j081114@dc.cis.okstate.edu> Sender: news Subject: Re: Why csh on Root? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:22:57 -0000 Martin McCormick wrote: > Is there any particular reason why FreeBSD has csh as the > default root shell? Nothing really wrong with it except that I The stock answer is that bash is not guaranteed to be available, as it is neither in the standard installation package, nor is it on the / partition. After you have installed it, it will go in the /usr path, which is often a separate partition. If that gets corrupted, and you've changed your root shell to be /usr/local/bin/bash, you won't be able to login as root! Even if you were to copy it to /bin, there might be other dependencies that won't be available. There was a recent thread here that talked about how to work around this. Personally, I just type 'bash' as the first thing when I login as root in single user mode. -- Jonathan Arnold (mailto:jdarnold@buddydog.org) Daemon Dancing in the Dark, a FreeBSD weblog: http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/ UNIX is user-friendly. It's just a bit picky about who its friends are.