Changing the default Ubuntu 12.04 shell from /bin/bash to /bin/dash

[Mwaoshe Njemah]

Not sure why I hadn't posted this to the list earlier.
I installed an Ubuntu 12.04 image on Digital Ocean a couple of weeks back.
Straight away I noticed a few things were awry.
For instance after adding an user, I realized SSHing into the instance as the user did not drop me into the user's home dir. In fact there was no home dir for the user.
After creating the user's home dir, I then realized that tab autocomplete wasn't available, which I found extremely annoying.
I cloned a .bashrc file I use on another Ubuntu 12.04 instance, and had been attempting to source it for weeks now.
Just this morning, I realized that source which is a built-in  Bash  command, wasn't available on my Shell. For reasons I can't comprehend, Ubuntu changed the default from /bin/bash to /bin/dash on the latest Ubuntu.
On the Bourne shell ". file" ought to source a file.
Except on my instance " . .bashrc" gets me the "file does not exist" error.
Long story short, I need a way to revert my default shell from /bin/dash to /bin/bash. Any pointers?

Xmir and Unity,

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Mwaoshe Njemah

[Alan Orth]

Njema,

You can just edit it in /etc/passwd, or use the `chsh` command.

Alan

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Alan Orth
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[rso...@gmail.com]

You can just edit it in /etc/passwd, or use the `chsh` command.

Alan

New users will still have dash assigned as the default shell. Furthermore all shell scripts that have "/bin/sh" as default interp. will end up being run by dash.  Stuff will break.  I advise changing the system-wide default shell.  Permafix for this is : "dpkg-reconfigure dash" which will give you the option of removing it as the system wide default shell.

BTW if you're looking at cloud I'd also strongly recommend Angani (www.angani.co) which is a local company that provides VMs for a reasonable price.  I use them for one of my projects and the in-country latency is impressively low.

[Mwaoshe Njemah]

Thank you Sohan will attempt your suggested solution.

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Mwaoshe Njemah
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[Dennis Mungai]

Hey Njema and Rohan,

That solution works.

Ubuntu Server 13.10 also switched to /bin/dash as the default shell, and to undo the damage,

dpkg-reconfigure dash

Does the trick.

See attached images for results.

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

[Mwaoshe Njemah]

For some reason  "dpkg-reconfigure dash" did not do the trick. I have had to call up bash everytime.

I just attempted "chsh" and changed the login shell to /bin/bash. I hope this works.