Why csh on Root?

[Jonathan Arnold]

Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	Is there any particular reason why FreeBSD has csh as the
> default root shell?  Nothing really wrong with it except that I

The stock answer is that bash is not guaranteed to be available,
as it is neither in the standard installation package, nor is it
on the / partition.  After you have installed it, it will go in
the /usr path, which is often a separate partition. If that gets
corrupted, and you've changed your root shell to be /usr/local/bin/bash,
you won't be able to login as root!  Even if you were to copy it
to /bin, there might be other dependencies that won't be available.

There was a recent thread here that talked about how to work around
this.  Personally, I just type 'bash' as the first thing when I login
as root in single user mode.

-- 
Jonathan Arnold     (mailto:jdarnold at buddydog.org)
Daemon Dancing in the Dark, a FreeBSD weblog:
     http://freebsd.amazingdev.com/blog/

UNIX is user-friendly. It's just a bit picky about who its friends are.