Dangers of using a non-base shell

[Michaël Grünewald]

Stephen Allen <p0036343 at brookes.ac.uk> writes:

> It's been drawn to my attention not to use bash from the ports
> collection, because if one of it's dependencies (gettext or libiconv)
> fails or is updated significantly, it could break, and prevent
> login. The suggested solution was to use a base shell (such as sh) and
> append 'bash -l' to .shrc to automatically enter bash.

The root account has a duplicate `toor'. Thus administrators can
change `toor' login shell to their preferred, with no risk of
making the `root' account unusable.

Regarding user accounts, I have no suggestions.

BTW, when I moved from Linux to FreeBSD, I wanted to use BASH as my
login shell. On day, I decided to try TCSH: user experience in FreeBSD
is awesome, and since TCSH is the default shell there, I was convinced
it was worth. My try was a switch, first because TCSH has cool
features (see tcshrc at sourceforge) and second because of the
advantage of using a shell you cannot program. The advantage is that
you I not write illegible one-liners that cripple my files because I
hit ENTER instead of BACKSPACE. In lieu of one-liners I now write
one-filers, and I have much less shell incident than before.
-- 
Best regards,
Michaël