Hi, I've been racking my brains trying to remember, but, whats the command to change the default shell? I'm currently always in the Korn shell and I want to start out in the Bash shell. I'm running a variant of BSD I guess in Mac OS X 10.2.2 and Mandrake. Thanks.

ccindyderek

sh, (bourne shell? )
ksh (korn shell)
csh for c shell

In Mandrake, use the command (at the command line of course) "chsh".

In MacOSX, it's a little more complicated...
You have to change it in NetInfo Manager. Go to "Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager" (as an admin), select "/", "users", your user ID. In the bottom pane, select the "shell" attribute, click the lock in the bottom-hand corner and enter the admin password. Edit the shell attribute to point the full path to your shell (/bin/bash is a common one, unless you've installed ksh...).

If you want to be thorough, and use the same shell in single user mode (if you hold down command-s while booting), you have to edit the files /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd. An easy way to do this is with the pico editor using Terminal.app. In the terminal, do:
sudo pico /etc/passwd
and
sudo pico /etc/master.passwd

Find your username, and on the last line, you'll have to change your shell manually from /bin/csh to whatever you want (/bin/bash, etc...). You can use the chsh commandin MacOSX, but it doesn't update both files.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Oops, I almost forgot, you can get the "real" ksh from AT&T...
Mandrake comes with pdksh, a ksh clone, and MacOSX doesn't come with one.
Here is a direct link to Ksh93 at ATT.com:
http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/dow....darwin.ppc.gz

Once it's unpacked on OSX (Stuffit usually does it automatically), you can move it to /bin with the Terminal.

The Linux standalone is here:
http://www.research.att.com/~gsf/dow....linux.i386.gz

It should work the same way...

Again, please post back with any problems or questions...

In FreeBSD - and OpenBSD if I remember correctly, type
Using your default editor type, change the line entatled "Shell" to point to the shell you want to use - then log out and log in again!