On Fri, 9 Oct 1998, Ken Nakata wrote:

> No, reread what he wrote a bit more carefully.  He's used to using
> *bash* (with which above would work just fine) but he's trying to set
> the path within *csh*.  Not having read his post very carefully myself,
> I suggested he install the bash binary package, but a more correct
> solution would be change root's shell to /bin/sh from /bin/csh. 

No! Don't change "root"'s shell! Though it's not often a problem w/
NetBSD, it's bad practice to change the root account's shell. Just use
vipw to create a second UID 0 account, with a different name, and give it
the shell you want. All my systems have a croot account, with tcsh as the
shell.

The problem is that some systems assume that root's shell is the shell
they ship it with. If it's not, then all hell can break loose.

> Changing root's shell to something under /usr might be like inviting a
> disaster to happen (maybe it's not so bad, but I don't like it
> nonetheless, especially when our /bin/sh has history and command line
> editting on its own; I use bash as a normal, non-root user, though).

Actually, there are two problems with a shell in /usr. 1) if you've got
/usr on a seperate partition, if /usr won't mount, you have a problem
getting in as root. :-)  2) The shell needs to be linked staticly. Most
programs in /usr are dynamically linked to the libraries. If you have
library problems, then you're hosed.

> I always change root's shell to /bin/sh as soon as I do a fresh install
> whether it's NetBSD or something else.  I personally think no variant of
> csh should ever be distributed with the rest of the system.

Why not just use the toor account. It has UID=0, ships with NetBSD, and
has sh as its shell?

Take care,

Bill