Since newly registering, where I set the terminal type to "ansi" and
the "shell" type to "bbs", I would like to change these values to "vt100"
and "shell" respectively.  I have scanned the help texts, and don't see
how to do that.  Could someone give me a quick reference on how to do it,
and also where to look in the future to find answers to do these sorts of
things?  Also, since I originally said "shell" was "bbs", when I entered
the "unix" command, which shell was I given:  cshell, Bourne, or other?
(It looks like it was the Bourne...).

TIA for your help,
KLA

10 responses total.

You can change the shell by typing "!chsh" at a bbs prompt, or "chsh" at a 
shell prompt.  If I'm remembering correctly, it will tell you what to do
after that.  To change the terminal emulation, edit your .profile file, and
change wherever it says "ansi" to "vt100".

And the default shell on this & most Unix systems is sh (the Bourne shell),
so that is indeed what you get if Picospan is your login shell.

Since the new machine has apropos (yay!), you could do something like
apropos change
But I see that the relevant line you get (out of all those irrelevant ones)
lists passwd, chfn, and chsh and says "change local or NIS password
information".  I don't think that would have been enough for me if I didn't
already know about chsh.  Still, that's a way to scan for man entries
relating to some topic.  (Then you do
man chsh
to find out about the chsh command - which I expect you already know.)

One problem encountered by some of my friends is that when they ran
newuser, they said bbs. Then later, they changed their minds, and
when they changed to shell (csh in their case, as that's all we use
at work) by using !chsh, they found that they did not wind up with
reasonable starting .cshrc and .login files.

If they had chosen csh during newuser, they would have gotten a
reasonable starting point. What can one do to ease the setting up of
.cshrc and .login files for users changing via chsh to csh (or tcsh)
from bbs?

Does this same problem occur if you're chsh'ing to sh or bash?

This response has been erased.

(From the originator):  I'm happy enough with the Bourne shell.  So what I
need to know, since I originally registered with "bbs" as what gets invoked
when I login, is what command to execute or file to edit to invoke "sh"
instead.  Again, TVMIA!  :-)

Steve, the .profile created if you chose bbs originally is quite adequate for
using sh.

Kevin, from the bbs prompt just run !chsh.  Or do unix and then chsh.

Valerie, what's the difference between /bin/sh and /usr/bin/sh or between
/bin/csh and /usr/bin/csh?  (In general, I mean - I now note that they're
hard links for the same files here on Grex.)  I've often wondered about
this.

On the Sun-3, /bin is a symbolic link to /usr/bin, so the two directories
have identical contents.

Back when I was experimenting with other shells, I'd look at the
system files of other users who were using the shells.  From there
I'd edit my own files.

I have successfully changed my "after login shell" to "sh", using the chsh
program.  Note that for the value of "old shell" it displayed just the 2
characters "/b"; I had registered originally using "bbs".  Is /b a 
legitimate value, or possibly a truncation of something in /bin ?
Note that there is no "bbs" choice listed in /etc/shells.  FYI, KLA

/b is what you get if you choose bbs, I think.  It seems to be a script that
runs .profile, sets up a couple of things, and then does
exec /usr/local/bin/bbs

So you're getting bbs, just packaged a little.

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