On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Michael G. Schabert wrote:

> 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.

I see nothing against setting up something like oh say pine as your
default shell; as long as it's statically linked and you keep /bin/sh
and/or /bin/csh around. It's been my experience that if root's shell isn't
available when the computer is put into single user mode, another default
(/bin/sh on fbsd) is chosen.

- alex