Answers to: What shells are available on the box ?

Answer by tallship

tallship — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:31:56 -0400

which and whereis, along with locate. on a newly installed machine run

# updatedb

when you first install the OS so you can use locate, which likes specific syntax,but shows everything matching.

And on Slackware you can grep /var/log/packages for a match.

For determining, say, whether you had ruby installed, you would type:

# which ruby

And if ruby is installed, you should get back:

/usr/bin/ruby

...others are python, bash, tclsh, tcsh, zsh, ksh, tksh, sh (usuallaly just a symlink to /usr/bin/bash, but will actually point to /bin/tcsh if you choose the C shell as your particular user's default.

man whereis

man which

man locate

to quickly determine the default shell for any particular user simply grep /etc/password for their username and examine the designated shell (or lack thereof) there.

$ cat /etc/passwd |grep jschmoe

I hope that helps!

Kindest regards,

Bradley

Answer by pmarini

pmarini — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:54:53 -0400

I'm not sure whether the following will double-check the actual existance of the shell files but it should work and looks a little neater too:

chsh -l

Answer by gjcwilliams

gjcwilliams — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:31:37 -0400

Have you a look in /etc/shells?

cat /etc/shells

Thinking about this further you could also make use of "whatis" command for any shells that are not listed in "/etc/shells".

cd /bin; whatis * | grep -i 'shell'

This will list any shells in '/bin' that have a description that contains the word "shell". It may also be worth doing this in other directories such as /usr/bin, /sbin. This may produce the odd false positive but should give you something to work with.