changing shells

i don't know if this a fedora-specific thing or a newer linux thing, but in the past changing your default shell was as simple as editing the /etc/passwd file. today, there is the chsh which can perform this for you. there is a catch, however. the shell must exist in the /etc/shells file to be allowed to be changed.

to make this work, i needed to add my shell to the /etc/shells file. then i issued the chsh to make my shell change.

$ chsh -l
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/usr/bin/sh
/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/tmux
/bin/tmux
/usr/bin/xonsh

$ sudo chsh -s /usr/bin/xonsh mock

Changing shell for mock.

Shell changed.

my previous post about xonsh is what led me here. i had manually changed the shell directly in the /etc/passwd file, but then my gnome session did not recognize my user. this was the strange side effect of changing the default shell not on the /etc/shells list. gnome (gdm) started the gnome-initial-setup process which runs when gnome is freshly installed.

and thing are still messed up. the gnome settings > users section shows no one, even though i am logged in under my account. (figuring out how to fix this will be another lesson for a future time.)

xonsh

there was small thread on the knoxdev's slack account about shells the other day. as i was trying to continue the discussion cleverly using the shell names as regular words in sentences, i did a quick search for available shells from my package manager (i.e. dnf search shell). as i was looking through the results, i found xonsh.

the description listed in my package manager tells me this is what it is:

Description  : xonsh is a Python-ish, BASHwards-compatible shell language and
             : command prompt. The language is a superset of Python 3.4 with
             : additional shell primitives. xonsh (pronounced *conch*) is
             : meant for the daily use of experts and novices alike.

i have toyed around with the idea of using python's interactive shell as my main terminal shell for some time, but i always felt it would be too hard to do some of the simple things, such as file management. sure, i could write equivalent scripts to do those tasks, but i never made the effort.

this accomplishes exactly what i wanted to do. with xonsh, i can do this:

~ $ ls -l gPodder/

total 124

-rw-r--r--. 1 mock mock 90112 Feb 19  2018 Database

drwxrwxr-x. 3 mock mock  4096 Feb 12  2018 Downloads

drwxrwxr-x. 2 mock mock  4096 Feb 19  2018 Logs

-rw-rw-r--. 1 mock mock  2715 Feb 19  2018 Settings.json

-rw-r--r--. 1 mock mock 20480 Feb 19  2018 gpodder.net

~ $ from datetime import datetime

~ $ datetime.now()

datetime.datetime(2018, 10, 23, 8, 35, 50, 863981)

there is much more to xonsh than just this. the full documentation can be found at http://xon.sh.