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From: rml@hpfcla.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re:  Alternate Shells
Message-ID: <131900003@hpfcls.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Aug-85 17:39:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpfcls.131900003
Posted: Wed Aug 21 17:39:00 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Aug-85 06:00:59 EDT
Organization: 21 Aug 85 15:39:00 MDT
Lines: 22

> >A quickie: 4.2BSD chsh does not allow the user to specify alternative
> >shells - only "sh" and "csh" are permitted. Why is this? It seems
> >ironically inappropriate in UNIX, where the shell is ``an ordinary,
> >swappable user program'' and ``user-selectable system interfaces [...]
> >become essentially trivial to implement'' [Ritchie & Thompson CACM 1974].
>
> I think you can see it more as a site policy rather than a restriction
> imposed by UNIX. Go bug your SA if you have a good argument.

I agree, that it should a matter of site policy.  Some system
administrators like the idea that the Bourne shell executes commands
from /etc/profile every time a user logs in, so they can have some
control of what the user sees or does at that time (like /etc/motd).
There were thus administrators who didn't like csh as a login shell (and
forced their users to use sh and exec a link to csh named -csh from
.profile).  For this reason HP modified csh to read commands from a file
/etc/csh.login prior to ~/.login.  Having chsh read a list of allowable
files from a file sounds like a good solution (though I'm not sure I'd
agree that the file belongs in /lib).

			Bob Lenk
			{hplabs, ihnp4}!hpfcla!rml