Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site Glacier.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!genrad!decvax!decwrl!Glacier!conor From: conor@Glacier.ARPA (Conor Rafferty) Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: Alternate Shells Message-ID: <10672@Glacier.ARPA> Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 03:52:21 EDT Article-I.D.: Glacier.10672 Posted: Tue Aug 13 03:52:21 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 15-Aug-85 08:20:14 EDT Reply-To: conor@Glacier.UUCP (Conor Rafferty) Organization: Stanford University, IC Laboratory Lines: 11 Summary: Why is chsh fascist? A quickie: 4.2BSD chsh does not allow the user to specify alternative shells - only "sh" and "csh" are permitted. Why is this? It seems ironically inappropriate in UNIX, where the shell is ``an ordinary, swappable user program'' and ``user-selectable system interfaces [...] become essentially trivial to implement'' [Ritchie & Thompson CACM 1974]. Conor Rafferty conor@su-glacier.arpa 231A Applied Electronics Lab. conor@su-sierra.arpa Stanford University Ca.94305 decwrl!glacier!conor (415)497-1515