On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, 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
> are always available (non /usr) & startup files may depend on syntax. My
> question is...would it be a bad thing (tm) to do something like put the
> name of a preferred shell into the last line of root's .login file? I'm
> thinking that this shouldn't break anything because everything is already
> set up in the system, & if something happened to break, the pwd.db still
> has the default shell so you wouldn't be disabling all access to the system.

What I do is leave root's shell at the default and "su -m" when I need to
become root. This makes sure that root is still functional if something
really bad happens and I have to go single-user w/o /usr mounted but still
allows me to do day-to-day stuff in my favorite shell (/usr/pkg/bin/tcsh).


-- 
Dave Schmitt <dschmi1@umbc.edu>