John Ostrowick wrote:
> 
> >As regards the original question: that's very weird... it should Just Work.
> >Can you give me the exact text of the error messages you get, and tell me how
> >to reproduce the problems?
> 
> ok, what i'll do is try the change to bash, if the system works smoothly
> (it was a long time ago that i tried this last), i'll leave it. if it
> messes up, i'll come back with the error report. as i said, it came up with
> bizzarre things like error messages from cron and sendmail. :-7 ? anyway,
> lemme try and i'll return if it messes up (or not).

Although I'd strongly recommend against changing the root shell to bash or
tcsh (I find that they seem to get corrupted on my machine from time to
time...having one as the root shell could be rather dangerous that way
:-), I'd at least recommend recompiling bash so that it's _statically_
linked.  Then make sure that you've installed it in /bin.  This way, if
you have a separate root and /usr partitions, you can still use
single-user mode!  Also, you don't have to worry about changes in any of
the shared libraries causing trouble for your shell.

All that said...why are you logging in as root anyway?  I would say that
the "proper" way to be doing it is to pick whatever shell you want for
yourself, put yourself in group "wheel", and then use "su" to become root.
In fact, if you use "su -m", you will retain your environment as root
(i.e. you'll be root but with _your_ shell, read the su manpage for more 
info). Then the only time that you'll see root's shell is in single-user
mode, which is usually pretty rare.

I hope this helps some.

Later.

-- 
Colin Wood                                 cwood@ichips.intel.com
Component Design Engineer - MD6                 Intel Corporation
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I speak only for myself, not for my employer.