[gorgoiler]

Why do people care what their default shell is, when you can just “exec csh” immediately upon logging in?

Was this kind of shell changing disabled? Maybe there’s no way of doing that exec automatically? Is there some advantage to having your shell of choice explicitly listed in /etc/passwd?

[dekhn]

There's a long list of boring answers you probably don't care about involving "these are biomedical researchers using UNIX, not hackers", "complex legacy scripts that depend on default shells", and "enterprise compliance".

[gorgoiler]

The second two sound quite interesting. I hadn’t thought about those at all.