From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Sep 18 04:57:41 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id EAA24956 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 04:57:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monet.telebyte.nl (jvissers@monet.telebyte.nl [194.235.214.12]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id EAA24922 for ; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 04:57:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from jvissers@localhost) by monet.telebyte.nl (8.7.3/8.6.11) id NAA14246 for questions@freebsd.org; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 13:57:33 +0200 From: Jos Vissers Message-Id: <199609181157.NAA14246@monet.telebyte.nl> Subject: Re: bash default shell for root To: questions@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 13:57:32 +0200 (MET DST) In-Reply-To: from "Eric J. Schwertfeger" at Sep 14, 96 06:36:32 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Eric J. Schwertfeger wrote: > On Sun, 15 Sep 1996, Anthony Hill wrote: > > Are there any strong reasons why I should not set root's default shell to > > bash, and if not, what do I need to do ? > > Yes. root's shell needs to be a statically linked shell in /bin for > disaster recovery. bash, as installed from ports, is dynamically > linked, and in /usr/local/bin, so if something goes wrong and /usr > doesn't get mounted, you can't log in as root (except via single user > mode). That said, I believe you'll find that sh is close enough to bash > for occasional use. It doesn't do everything bash does, but you set > environmental variables, do for loops, etc the same as under bash, and you > can set emacs mode line editing, so it's good enough for me. I have made a statically linked version of bash for this purpose but found that when it can't get to the password database it still won't go. I had NIS running on my home machine and when booting in single user mode it doesn't start up NIS so the machine doesn't have a complete password database. The same problem occurs when the NIS server doesn't respond. Even with a root entry in the actual password file it was a no go. I'm still not sure what the precise cause was but i decided that it is better to have /bin/sh as root login shell. Jos -- Jos Vissers, System administrator Telebyte