Settting zsh as shell for "Run UNIX command"

[Piotr Kolasiński]

By running command inside "Run UNIX command" like:

cat $0 

I see that in practice the command i prefixed by shebang #!/bin/sh, so it means that real shell for execution is /bin/sh. 

I cannot find settings to change this default behaviour (to reach all my settings, generally my PATH) in "Run Unix command" environment.

Does someone know way to change that?

Piotr 

[Rich Siegel]

On 20 Nov 2025, at 12:08, Piotr Kolasiński wrote:

> By running command inside "Run UNIX command" like:
> cat $0
> I see that in practice the command i prefixed by shebang #!/bin/sh, so it
> means that real shell for execution is /bin/sh.

If you use "Run Unix Command" to run `env`, you'll see that the active shell is in fact `zsh`, provided that is your login shell.

If your environment isn't what you expect it to be, you may need to make some adjustments. Here's more on that: https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/zshenv.html

Enjoy,

R.


--
Rich Siegel Bare Bones Software, Inc.
<sie...@barebones.com> <https://www.barebones.com/>

Someday I'll look back on all this and laugh... until they sedate me.

[Piotr Kolasiński]

I can't fully agree with your response. 

I understand differences between login shell, interactive shell and batch shell. But there are some additional details:

• If you look into zsh documentation of zsh in point (https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Invocation.html#Invocation) you will see statements: Zsh tries to emulate sh or ksh when it is invoked as sh or ksh respectively; more precisely, it looks at the first letter of the name by which it was invoked, excluding any initial ‘r’ (assumed to stand for ‘restricted’), and if that is ‘b’, ‘s’ or ‘k’ it will emulate sh or ksh. Furthermore, if invoked as su (which happens on certain systems when the shell is executed by the su command), the shell will try to find an alternative name from the SHELL environment variable and perform emulation based on that.
• ... and ... The usual zsh startup/shutdown scripts are not executed. Login shells source /etc/profile followed by $HOME/.profile. If the ENV environment variable is set on invocation, $ENV is sourced after the profile scripts.

I've made some tests: put  in files .profile and .zprofile command echo ".profile executed" / echo ".zprofile executed" and executed:

• in terminal:
  • /bin/sh -->  None
  • /bin/sh -l -->  .profile executed
  • /bin/zsh --> Output from my .zshrc
  • /bin/zsh -l --> .zprofile executed and output from my .zshrc
  • /bin/zsh -i -->Output from my .zshrc
• from BBEdit - command like echo "Hello world" 
  • result Hello world - should be .zprofile executed  as Bare Bones write in link pointing by you 
• The SHELL environment is set by the current shell based on current login shell defined for user  as information for other processes which program to call  when shell should be executed (in Linux/Unix - entry in /etc/passwd file) and not represents current  executing shell - to test - just ran /bin/bash and check what will be set in SHELL
• If you check man sh - you will see the it is the wrapper program which in practice call (exec inplace rather not spawn process) program pointed by symbolic link /private/var/select/sh - in my case it is ... /bin/bash, please check in your system, in my opinion it also be /bin/bash. And in the case of  bash the rules are the same - if it is running as /bin/sh (arg 0 provided to the process), bash all try to behave as /bin/sh - check man bash and look for  sh (sorrounded by spaces) - part of man : If bash is invoked with the name sh, it tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well.

If you verify all that things and agree with me, please consider to add additional mechanism and setup option to define how the  "Run UNIX command" menu option should be executed

Piotr

[Piotr Kolasiński]

Additional info

If we follow on symboli link /private/var/select/sh and assume that /bin/sh in practice execute /bin/bash - the question arise - from where the default PATH is set. Looking into /etc/profile I see: 

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
        eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
        [ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

and first position is /usr/libexec/path_helper -s  

check the man path_helper and what I see - the default is taken from /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d what is exactly the same what I see when I put command echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n' into window "Run UNIX command"

Sorry for that long story - it is the result of switching 30-years experienced  UNIX person to macOS who is asking questions around :-)

Piotr