Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 14:55:03 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, Jason Vervlied <jvervlied@hway.net> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: bash in /usr/local/bin? Message-ID: <p0510100fb79b2a85857c@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <20010810233635.A12077@xor.obsecurity.org> References: <3B74D180.D036D629@hway.net> <20010810233635.A12077@xor.obsecurity.org>
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At 11:36 PM -0700 8/10/01, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>On Sat, Aug 11, 2001, Jason Vervlied wrote:
> > Is there a reason why the bash shell is kept in /usr/local/bin.
>
>Ports get installed under ${PREFIX} (/usr/local by default).
>
> > I would personally prefer to use it for my root shell, but
> > if I remember right, root needs to have something that is
> > in /bin (I could be wrong).
>
>You are wrong.
... And you ARE the weakest link! :-)
Seriously though, it would be mighty prudent to have the shell
for userid root to be in some directory which is part of the
root filesystem. I suspect that very few people keep /usr/local
in their root filesystem. So, while a shell doesn't need to be
in /bin per se, that IS a pretty popular place to put any shell
which someone expects to use as the default for userid root.
As to Jason's situation, I also like to use bash as my shell
even when I am root. However, I do not want to muck around with
the port for 'bash', or do anything else to move where bash is
or how it's built. So, the way I decided to handle it was to
add the following lines in the /root/.login file:
if ( -x /usr/local/bin/bash ) then
# echo "Switching to bash"
exec /usr/local/bin/bash -login
endif
So, strictly speaking /bin/csh is still the default shell for
root, but the effect for me is that I automatically get bash
whenever I log in. This seems to work fine for me, and I am
not aware of any problems which have been caused by this trick
in the few years that I have been using it.
Another tactic Jason could take is to follow the example of
userid 'toor'. So, create a new userid called 'broot', with
uid=0 (so it should act like 'root'), but set it's shell to
/usr/local/bin/bash. I don't have any idea how well this
would work in practice, but it might be something else to try.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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