Newbieish Desktop Questions

[Kristian Holdich]

On Sat, 2004-07-10 at 14:40, Kjell Midtseter wrote:
> On 10 Jul 2004 at 10:03, Kristian Holdich wrote:
> 
> > Speaking of root, i'm so used to Bash i'd like to switch to it for the
> > root user - is there any gotchas with moving bash to /bin and updating
> > /etc/shells to allow it?
> >From my notes:
> --------
> Use FreeBSD's password file manipulation utility, vipw, to 
> modify root's default shell. At a root prompt, type vipw. A copy 
> of the /etc/passwd file will be displayed. Use standard vi 
> editing commands to change root's default shell from /bin/csh 
> (all of the way at the end of the first line) to 
> /usr/local/bin/bash. While you're already editing the file, go 
> ahead and change root's unofficial name 'Charlie &' to 'Super-
> Nina' or any other name that envisions Superman, etc. When you 
> get mail from root (e.g. from the cron jobs that run every 
> night), it'll now be maked as coming from 'Super-Nina' and not 
> 'Charlie &'...just a little bit nicer. Save & exit. 
> -----------
> GL from kjell
> 

There's one glaring problem with that, if for some reason you need to go
into single user mode under FreeBSD's default slicing scheme root wont
have a shell as /usr isn't mounted. It's always good practice to keep
the shell root uses in /sbin or /bin.

You can change the shell root, or any other user uses by using chpass
also, and so long as the shell is in /etc/shells it will be valid.

I was actually more interested in understanding whether any critical
scripts would start barfing if the shell got changed, I know on Solaris
I got into the habit of keeping root using /sbin/sh.