Lab- Legolas shell

[Tim Childers]

In the lab should Legolas shell to be just tcsh or /bin/tsch?

[fred deakin]

Hi Tim,

You don't need to put the absolute path. Just "tcsh" works. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing that if you use the absolute path, the kernel won't be able to find the shell.

Fred

[Jonathan Simms]

Fred and Tim,

Fred, I don't want to contradict you however I believe it would be best practice to use an absolute path to the shell in this case. Using useradd in the lab I found that when adding a shell, using flag -s, that if you don't supply the absolute path useradd will not recognize the shell. Personally I would go with the absolute path name to avoid ambiguity.

Jonathan.

[keivn dodd]

Without using absolute path tsch does not necessarily point to /bin/tcsh but rather could point to anything named tsch in a $path variable directory.

[Tim Childers]

The reason whay pointed this out was because the lab was miss-leading, it just said "tsh". You need the absoute path, because when you login one first thing it dose is fine the shell you are using. Is there is no absolute path and it will try to fine tsh in /.

[fred deakin]

I edited the /etc/passwd file to point to tcsh. I didn't use the absolute path because (I assume) the /etc/passwd file points to the /bin directory.

[Jonathan Simms]

Fred,

I don't believe that /etc/passwd looks into the bin directory unless specified to do so. In fact I don't think a shell is even necessary for certain account types such as accounts that are non-interactive and non-login. If you take a look at the /etc/passwd file for opus you will notice that there are some accounts which are not shells, such as scp. I think that using an absolute path is good practice and if it is necessary for /etc/passwd that I'm not sure of however as Kevin noted that by used an absolute path you are going to be certain which tcsh you're using which avoids a security issue in the off chance that you might have tcsh file somewhere other than /bin and you have set, or someone else has set, your home directory at the beginning of PATH.