Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Changing Your Shell Temporarily

You can change your shell temporarily by creating a subshell and using that instead of the original shell. You can create a subshell using any shell available on your Unix system. This means that you can look in the /etc/shells file and use a shell listed there, or you can use a shell installed elsewhere on the system (Code Listing 3.6).

Code Listing 3.6. Checking the list of shells from /etc/shells and looking for other programs that end with “sh” is a good way to find all of the shells on the system.

[ejr@hobbes]$ cat /etc/shells /bin/bash /bin/sh /bin/tcsh /bin/csh [ejr@hobbes]$ ls /usr/local/bin/*sh /usr/local/bin/pdksh [ejr@hobbes]$

Code Listing 3.7. Type in the shell name (which is really just another ...