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Date:      Sat, 11 Aug 2001 14:55:03 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, Jason Vervlied <jvervlied@hway.net>
Cc:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: bash in /usr/local/bin?
Message-ID:  <p0510100fb79b2a85857c@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <20010810233635.A12077@xor.obsecurity.org>
References:  <3B74D180.D036D629@hway.net> <20010810233635.A12077@xor.obsecurity.org>

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At 11:36 PM -0700 8/10/01, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>On Sat, Aug 11, 2001, Jason Vervlied wrote:
>  > Is there a reason why the bash shell is kept in /usr/local/bin.
>
>Ports get installed under ${PREFIX} (/usr/local by default).
>
>  > I would personally prefer to use it for my root shell, but
>  > if I remember right, root needs to have something that is
>  > in /bin (I could be wrong).
>
>You are wrong.

...  And you ARE the weakest link!                         :-)

Seriously though, it would be mighty prudent to have the shell
for userid root to be in some directory which is part of the
root filesystem.  I suspect that very few people keep /usr/local
in their root filesystem.  So, while a shell doesn't need to be
in /bin per se, that IS a pretty popular place to put any shell
which someone expects to use as the default for userid root.

As to Jason's situation, I also like to use bash as my shell
even when I am root.  However, I do not want to muck around with
the port for 'bash', or do anything else to move where bash is
or how it's built.  So, the way I decided to handle it was to
add the following lines in the /root/.login  file:

if ( -x /usr/local/bin/bash ) then
    # echo "Switching to bash"
    exec /usr/local/bin/bash -login
endif

So, strictly speaking /bin/csh is still the default shell for
root, but the effect for me is that I automatically get bash
whenever I log in.  This seems to work fine for me, and I am
not aware of any problems which have been caused by this trick
in the few years that I have been using it.

Another tactic Jason could take is to follow the example of
userid 'toor'.  So, create a new userid called 'broot', with
uid=0 (so it should act like 'root'), but set it's shell to
/usr/local/bin/bash.  I don't have any idea how well this
would work in practice, but it might be something else to try.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu

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