On Sat, Jul 03, 1999 at 10:05:05AM -0400, Michael G. Schabert wrote:
> Hi all,
> This is a pretty general question & should be easy to answer :-). I know
> that changing root's shell is considered a no-no, mostly since sh and csh

Why a no-no? A few months ago we had a big discussion about changing root's
login shell to /bin/sh. The decision was to keep it csh, but as far as I remember
mostly for historical reasons.

On my systems I routinely change root's login shell to /bin/sh (or to bash if
it is available) and don't see any adverse effects. The startup scripts (rc and
friends) are started using /bin/sh regardless of root's login shell as far as
I know. Most other scripts that care about their shell set it with the
#!/bin/sh line.

My conclusion: you set root's shell to whatever you prefer on your systems, but
the distributed default stays /bin/csh, at least until a (new?) concensus is
reached.

- regards
Erik Bertelsen