Jim Moy

The default shell in Dachstein is ash, a lightweight shell that handles most of the system scripting chores. I prefer bash as my login shell to get features like command line history, and whatever other behaviors I’ve become used to over the years.

A bash LRP package is available for Dachstein, and what this does via a link from /bin/sh is make bash the default shell for the entire system. There is an incompatibility between bash and some LRP packages in Dachstein, dnscache and tinydns are a couple of examples. One way to work around this problem is to install bash and fix up the incompatible scripts to use ash instead.

However, replacing a shell wholesale like that doesn’t make me feel confident that I’m getting the tested behavior, so I’ve created a modified version of the bash LRP package that can be downloaded here which simply omits the link from /bin/sh. Then I edit /etc/password for those users I want bash to be their login shells, and ash continues to be the shell for the rest of the system scripts.