"valid shell"s

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

How can I configure my system so that any path is considered acceptable
by, eg, chsh?

That's actually a rhetorical question.  I know the answer: I can't,
except by hacking on everything that does such tests.  I ask it to
point up that, while it's good for an OS to support that kind of
lockdown, and perhaps even reasonable to default to it, it's
unreasonable to support nothing else.

The real problem, of course, is that the interface - getusershell -
used for the purpose is badly designed; it exposes too much of the
implementation, imposing too much policy.  Instead, it should be
something like usershellisvalid(), taking the proposed shell path; then
its backend(s) could support things like "anything is valid" or
"anything in /usr/local/shells/ is valid" or "anything in a directory
that's root-owned and non-world-writable all the way from / is valid"
as well as "these specific paths are valid".  I'm not entirely alone in
seeing this as a problem; witness /SENDMAIL/ANY/SHELL/.

If I were to design and implement something usershellisvalid()ish
(probably with a compatability getusershell() interface), would there
be any interest in seeing it in the tree?

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