Macos – Switching to Zsh in macOS Catalina not working

bashmacos catalinaterminalzsh

I decided to take the plunge and switch to zsh. So, I followed the Terminal window instructions and entered:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

I then entered echo $0to see the switch – and it returned -bash!

Then, I went to the support page, and followed the instructions there to make the change through System Preferences. However, the "Login shell" dropdown already showed zsh:

So, I thought maybe I need to reboot… Nope, the System Preferences still show zsh, Terminal returns -bash, and when I try to re-run chsh -s /bin/zsh, Terminal returns chsh: no changes made.

Running echo $SHELL in Terminal returns /bin/zsh.

What am I missing???

Best Answer

Okay - one more place to check:

In Terminal's Preferences, under the General pane, there's an option to use the default login shell or set another. For some reason, mine is set to use another (probably set this in a far away time and place for some long done learning opportunity, lol).

Selected "Default login shell", opened a new Terminal window, and voilà, all is working as expected! Sheesh...

Found to look there in the same support article, under "How to use a different shell without changing the default".

Related Solutions

Macos – What’s at Risk with Switching to ZSH

The shebang line you show means to run the script using the Bourne shell (or another shell in compatibility mode). Those scripts will likely continue to run using the same shell they are now if you switch to zsh as your interactive shell. The only way that will change is if you link sh to zsh, but that shouldn't change the functionality.

You will find a certain amount of compatibility between zsh and Bash when used as your login shell or when writing scripts specifically calling for one or the other using shebang lines like:

#!/usr/bin/bash

#!/usr/bin/zsh

However, there are a lot of things that zsh does differently or that Bash can't do at all. Bash is much more widely used, so there are fewer people familiar with the intricacies of zsh. Information on it is widely available, though. Also, you'll find that there's more than adequate help available here.

You'll find that for writing scripts either shell is considerably more powerful than the Bourne shell (sh), but at the expense of portability. Also, since Bash is more widely used than zsh, its scripts are relatively more portable.

Linux – change default shell from zsh to bash

Make sure /usr/bin/chsh has execute permissions by running sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/chsh.

You should be able to run chsh using your own account. Otherwise you'd be setting root's shell. Try the following:

chsh -s $( which bash )

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Macos – What’s at Risk with Switching to ZSH

Linux – change default shell from zsh to bash

Related Question