Don’t change your login shell, use a modern terminal emulator
chsh
is a small tool that lets you change the default shell for your current user. In order to let any user change their own shell, which is set in /etc/passwd
, it needs privileges and is generally setuid
root
.
In this “UNIX legacy” series of posts, I am looking at classic setuid
binaries and try to find better, safer alternatives for common use cases. In this post, we will look at alternatives to changing your login shell.
Should you change the default shell?
People usually change their default shell because they want to use a modern alternative to Bash (Zsh, fish, Oils, nushell, etc.).