Why reccomend Bash shell?

Matthew Seaman m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk
Thu Dec 16 03:11:12 PST 2004


Adam wrote:
> In Greg Lehey's book "The Complete FreeBSD" he reccomends changing the default shell for users to bash shell. -p. 94
> 
> What are the Pro's/Con's of using bash as opposed to the other shells?

On point that no one has mentioned on this list yet is that it is a good 
idea to have root's shell be entirely contained on the root partition of 
the system -- ie. not just the executable, but any shlibs it requires as 
well.  There's been a thread over on freebsd-ports at ... about ppp(8) 
apparently failing because of problems linking libintl -- which actually 
turned out to be because root's shell had been changed to bash(1).

That's why there is a 'toor' account -- you can use whatever shell you 
like with that a/c and not fear mucking up important bits of the system.

On the other hand, I take the view that the less done by the super user 
the better, and discourage myself to use sudo(1) preferentially and to 
keep su(1) sessions as short as possible by making root's shell as 
/unfriendly/ as possible.

You could even go as far as Solaris does, where the root shell is 
/sbin/sh -- a statically linked cut down version of the standard Bourne 
shell that's got the best chance of still working even on a severely 
banjaxed system.  In FreeBSD terms, that would equate to using 
/rescue/sh -- mind you although that's statically linked, it's still a 
fully capable version of /bin/sh.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       8 Dane Court Manor
                                                       School Rd
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Tilmanstone
Tel: +44 1304 617253                                  Kent, CT14 0JL UK
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