Debian – Disable the configuration tool in Zsh

configurationdebianzsh

When there is no .zshrc file in a user's home directory and zsh is started, an interactive configuration utility is run instead of directly giving access to the shell prompt.

I set up zsh to be the default shell on my Debian Wheezy systems. Therefore every newly created user gets zsh as login shell if I do not change that manually. Also there is a default .zshrc in /etc/skel, so all regular users on my system have a copy of the file in their home directory. This is not the case for system users.

When I now change into a system user (for example the user for a specific network daemon) via sudo or sh I run into the configuration tool, because these users have no .zshrc in their home directories.

It doesn't feel right to place a .zshrc into each and every daemon's home directory, which also would be a pain to setup and maintain on a lot of systems. But I still wouldn't want to downgrade to a less comfortable bash for these users.

Is there a way to disable the zsh configuration tool without having to create a .zshrc file in the user's home directory? Additionally a way to setup a single file to be the system-wide default .zshrc for all users which don't have one would be nice too.

Best Answer

from: http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2007/msg00398.html

The shell then executes code in the file
scripts/newuser in the shared library area (by default
/usr/local/share/zsh/<VERSION>/scripts/newuser).  This feature can be
turned off simply by removing this script.  The module can be removed
entirely from the configured shell by editing the line starting
"name=zsh/newuser" in the config.modules file, which is generated in the
top level distribution directory during configuration: change the line to
include "link=no auto=no".

and /etc/zsh/zshrc is sourced by every shell that has the interactive,rcs, & globalrc options set. (which most interactive zsh processes do)

or add zsh-newuser-install() { :; } in /etc/zsh/zshenv Which has the obvious side-effect of users not being able to use the function until they undefine yours.

You can refine that by adding a test of the UID.

if (( EUID < 1000 )) && (( EUID != 0 )); then # or whatever the highest daemon uid on your system
  zsh-newuser-install() { :; }
fi

Related Solutions

ZSH: insert completion on first tab even if ambiguous

Add this line to your ~/.zshrc:

setopt menu_complete

See man zshoptions for details.

Use non-root user configuration for root account

Use sudo -E to preserve your environment:

$ export FOO=1
$ sudo -E env | grep FOO
FOO=1

That will preserve $HOME and any other environment variables you had, so the same configuration files you started with will be accessed by the programs running as root.

You can update sudoers to disable the env_reset setting, which clears out all environment variables and is generally enabled by default. You may have to enable the ability to use sudo -E at all in there as well. There are a few other sudoers settings that might be relevant: env_keep, which lets you specify specific variables to keep by default, and env_remove, which declares variables to delete always. You can use sudo sudo -V to see which variables are/are not preserved.

An alternative, if you can't modify sudoers, is to provide your environment explicitly:

sudo env HOME=$HOME command here

You can make a shell alias to do that automatically so you don't have to type it in.

Note that doing this (either way) can have potentially unwanted side effects: if the program you run tries to make files in your home directory, for example, those files will be created as root and your ordinary user won't be able to write to them.

For the specific case of vim, you could also put your .vimrc as the system-wide /etc/vimrc if you're the only user of this system.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

ZSH: insert completion on first tab even if ambiguous

Use non-root user configuration for root account

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