Those coming from Linux® are often surprised to find that Bash is not the default shell in FreeBSD. In fact, Bash is not even in the default installation. Instead, FreeBSD uses tcsh(1) as the default shell. Although, Bash and your other favorite shells are available in FreeBSD's Packages and Ports Collection.
If you do install other shells you can use chsh(1) to set
a user's default shell. It is, however, recommended that the
root
's default shell remain unchanged. The
reason for this is that shells not included in the base distribution
are normally installed in /usr/local/bin
or
/usr/bin
. In the event of a problem the file
systems where /usr/local/bin
and
/usr/bin
are located may not be mounted. In this
case root
would not have access to its default
shell, preventing root
from logging in. For this
reason a second root
account, the
toor
account, was created for use with non-default
shells. See the security FAQ for information regarding the toor account.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.