4 Feb 2010

Fixing the default shell in Ubuntu / Linux Mint

Author: admin | Filed under: General Info

From bloovis.com

Several years ago, the Ubuntu developers made a horrible decision to make dash the default shell instead of bash. This breaks numerous shell scripts, and I recently discovered it also broke one of my own Ruby scripts that depended on bash’s signal handling. The problem here was that when a TERM signal is sent to dash, it doesn’t kill off its child processes.

The problem isn’t fixed by making bash the login shell for a particular user, because some programs (such as Ruby) invoke /bin/sh, which is a symlink to /bin/dash. The fix for this problem is to make bash the default shell on a system-wide basis. The following command does that:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

When you are asked whether to install dash as /bin/sh, answer No. This will update the symlink, among other things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 7:31 am and is filed under General Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Fixing the default shell in Ubuntu / Linux Mint”

  1. Jesus Schroder Says:
    January 9th, 2012 at 4:20 am

    Thanks for helping out, superb info .

  2. Alberto Hertz Says:
    January 10th, 2012 at 3:38 am

    I got what you mean , thanks for putting up.Woh I am lucky to find this website through google. “I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.” by Steven Wright.

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