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by jmclnx
1703 days ago
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I am sad to hear FreeBSD is changing root from tcsh to sh (FreeBSD moved from csh to tcsh a while ago). It was one of the things that made FreeBSD unique. I guess the got sick of hearing this question: "can I change the root shell to bash ?". I think they were the last holdout of the BSDs. But to me, if you care what root's shell is, you are doing something wrong by using root way too often. |
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That said, it really was damned annoying. I like to port my software to AIX, FreeBSD, Linux/glibc, Linux/musl, NetBSD, macOS, OpenBSD, and Solaris. All of them use a Bourne-like root shell except FreeBSD, and every time I go to upgrade a FreeBSD VM or build a new one I seem to always trip over that at some point. If I used FreeBSD regularly I wouldn't care as much--I'd change the default, or know how to achieve what I want more directly. But not being familiar with FreeBSD, I always end up in a root shell poking around trying to remember how upgrades work, which tools I need to find documentation for, etc, and end up cursing csh for compounding the mental burden.
From my perspective, changing the default root shell is a benefit, albeit very minor. Though, if FreeBSD (and NetBSD and OpenBSD, for that matter) began publishing official VM images, that'd be worth so much more to me.