10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard

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Tue, Oct 30 2007 at 11:50AM PDT • Contributed by: DanFrakes

To change the login shell of your account in Leopard, do this...

Control-click on your account name in the Accounts pane of System Preferences and choose Advanced Options in the contextual menu that appears (you'll have to unlock the pane first, by clicking the lock icon).

In the resulting Advanced Options screen, either type in the path to your preferred shell, or choose among the various shells already installed in /bin: bash, tcsh, sh, csh, zsh, or ksh. Finally, click on OK.

The note at the top of the Advanced Options screen claims you have to restart for the change to take effect, but you really just need to log out and back in again.

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10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: solefald on Tue, Oct 30 2007 at 12:23PM PDT

you can achieve the same thing by running following command as root or sudo:

# chsh -s /path/to/your/shell username

Please make sure that /path/to/your/shell exists in /etc/shells. If it does not, you will not be able to login, or open new terminal windows.

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: wgscott on Tue, Oct 30 2007 at 11:53PM PDT

chsh -s /bin/zsh

is all you need to change your own shell. No root or sudo required, unless you want to change someone else's.

Needless to say, everyone should change to zsh.

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: pvaldoni on Wed, Oct 31 2007 at 3:48AM PDT

I'm not very good at it. What shall I do exactly, in order to login and have a "Solid Aqua dark blue" desktop only, avoiding the "Aurora" ?
Many thanks for answering me.

pvaldoni (Rome) p.valdoni@tin.it

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: wgscott on Wed, Oct 31 2007 at 12:12AM PDT

chsh -s /bin/zsh

is all you need to change your own shell. No root or sudo required, unless you want to change someone else's.

Needless to say, everyone should change to zsh.

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: wjv on Wed, Oct 31 2007 at 5:37AM PDT

Wow, chpass(1) has been patched to update Open Directory in Leopard?!

I'm pretty sure it didn't affect NetInfo in Tiger and earlier... did it?

Anyway, one can of course also manually go and edit the directory using dscl(1). Something like:

dscl . -change /Users/<username> UserShell <old_shell> <new_shell>

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: wgscott on Wed, Oct 31 2007 at 6:44AM PDT

It has been like that at least since 10.3.

I never gave it much thought, but you are right, that is quite impressive.

10.5: Change your login shell in Leopard
Authored by: vramin on Mon, Aug 25 2008 at 9:52AM PDT

You could just change the login shell in Terminal's preferences and leave the default alone.

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