How to change from csh to bash as default shell

Question

I have csh as my default shell, as shown by echo $SHELL. I want to switch to bash as my default shell. I tried the following approaches to no avail:

With chsh I get:

chsh: can only change local entries; use ypchsh instead.

With ypchsh I get:

ypchsh: yppasswdd not running on NIS master host ("dcsun2").

I only have .chsrc in my home directory and I cannot find any .profile files in /etc. How can I change my default shell to bash?

It could be useful to know on which type of unix you are. – enzotib Sep 13 '11 at 15:32 — enzotib, Sep 13 '11 at 15:32

score 48 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 12 '16 at 19:09

48

Make sure you've got bash installed.
Learn the location of bash:
```
which bash
```
or
```
whereis bash
```
Below, I'll assume the location is /bin/bash.

a) If you have administrative rights, just run as root:
```
usermod -s /bin/bash YOUR_USERNAME
```
(replacing YOUR_USERNAME with your user name).

b) If you don't have adm. rights, you can still just run bash --login at login, by putting the below line at the end of your .cshrc or .profile (in your home directory) :
```
setenv SHELL /bin/bash
exec /bin/bash --login
```

edited Feb 12 '16 at 19:09

aseagram

3

answered Sep 13 '11 at 16:13

rozcietrzewiacz

39,269

2b. Check if bash is enumerated in /etc/shells with correct path. – manatwork Sep 13 '11 at 16:37
@manatwork That would be relevant for 2a, not 2b. And only useful in a strange/broken system setup for determining why the solution did not work. – rozcietrzewiacz Sep 13 '11 at 16:46
Yes, actually my intention was to write something like "2a.b". – manatwork Sep 13 '11 at 17:02
1
SHELL=/bin/bash gives a command not found error. 2. Your solution gives me a bash shell as the prompt. But it does not change my login shell. Thanks for the help though.

Sumod

Sep 14 '11 at 06:37

1

Here is what I did to resolve this. 1. exec /bin/bash --login in the .cshrc file 2. set SHELL=/bin/bash and then export SHELL in the /etc/profile file. Thanks. – Sumod Sep 14 '11 at 08:41

2

Ah, sorry - I meant the first line to be export SHELL=/bin/bash. Actually there's a better way than that - see update. – rozcietrzewiacz Sep 14 '11 at 14:04

You don't have to do the which/whereis separately. For example, SHELL=`which bash` `which bash` YOUR_USERNAME – Kevin Nov 21 '15 at 16:43

exec /bin/bash without --login works for me – kchoi Aug 26 '16 at 20:16

exec /bin/bash --login does not seem to be reading .bashrc – Marcus Junius Brutus Oct 18 '16 at 16:38

@MarcusJuniusBrutus Because it is not supposed to do so. This seems to be a very common misconception - some distributions even ship default .bash_login, .profile or similar files which remedy this. But that is quite far from the original subject. You may ask a separate question. – rozcietrzewiacz Oct 18 '16 at 17:46

This seems to break non-interactive uses, like scp. You need if ($?prompt) then; exec /bin/bash --login; endif – joeln Mar 14 '18 at 00:33

WARNING: After adding exec /bin/bash, scp stopped working for me. – dips Oct 14 '18 at 14:38

score 13 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Contact your system administrator. He's set things up wrong. If you are your system administrator then you've set things up wrong.

The error message looks pretty straight forward. You don't have yppasswd running on dcsun2. It should be.

But doing a quick google search comes up with this result which indicates that you'll get this error if yppasswd is running on both the client and the server. In this case turn it off on the client.

If you're stuck with csh as your login shell, you can still make it invoke bash when you log in. Put the following commands in your ~/.login (see also Changing the default shell without chsh or administrator priviledges):

sleep 2
if (-x /usr/local/bin/bash) then
  exec /usr/local/bin/bash -l
endif

Replace /usr/local/bin/bash by the proper path if necessary. If everything works, remove sleep 2 (which puts a delay during which you can press Ctrl+C to drop to a csh prompt, in case something goes wrong).

How to change from csh to bash as default shell

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