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[Brian Candler]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 04:36:18PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> Most people never use the root shell directly

It's the very first point of contact with FreeBSD, when you login as root,
before you create new users. And after that, you get it whenever you use
"su". Once you've got to the point of installing and using sudo (which is
not part of the base system) then you won't see it.

> and all shell scripts are /bin/sh
> anyway...
> 
> It truely is one of those things that just doesn't matter at all.

It matters to me, when I'm trying to introduce people to Unix, as it is an
arbitrary inconsistency.

By all means have root's shell as csh by default, as long as all other
accounts are created with csh as default shell too. That, in my opinion,
would be somewhat better than what we have today; switching users with 'su'
wouldn't then give them a different shell to work in.

However, you'd then be left with the inconsistency that you're using one
shell syntax for interactive use, and a completely different one for writing
scripts; even now I catch myself out by typing

# for i in *; do {some stuff}; done

when in csh, and then cursing it.

At the moment I'm left trying to explain to people why, in a default FreeBSD
install, you get one shell for root and a different one for others. It gives
a bad impression of the system if the only explanation I can give is "yes
this is stupid, but it was a good idea 25 years ago, and nobody thinks it's
worthwhile fixing it".

Yes, if you're an experienced FreeBSD user it doesn't matter 2 jots, because
you can do whatever you prefer (change root's shell, or change your other
users' shells) to fix it, in a matter of seconds. But, in my experience, it
*does* impede getting comfortable with the system quickly for newcomers, by
which I mean primarily newcomers to Unix, as opposed to migrants from Linux.

Regards,

Brian.