Newbieish Desktop Questions
Kristian Holdich
kjholdich at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Jul 10 07:03:08 PDT 2004
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.
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