Changing your default shell

One of the neat things about *nix is the ability to work with many different shells. As with anything else in the *nix world there is bound to be heated debates over which shell is better. Whether you want to use good ol' sh or (my personal favorite) bash you can change your default shell using the commands below.

1. Do a cat on /etc/shells. The output will show you the location of the binaries for all the shells installed on your system. IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE THE SHELL YOU WANT TO USE IS!:
   cat /etc/shells
   
   
2. Now use the chsh command to change your default shell. On Free and OpenBSD the command to change your default shell to bash is (this may differ if your on another *nix variant so read your man page for chsh):
   chsh -s /path/to/bash
   
   
3. If you don't know what variant you are using do this to find out:
   uname -a