Shell Login – How to Check if a Shell is Login, Interactive, or Batch

shell

I think I understand the differences between an interactive, a login and a batch shell. See the following links for more help:

What is the difference between a 'Login' and an 'Interactive' bash shell (from the sister site: serverfault.com)
2.1: Types of shell: interactive and login shells (from A User's Guide to the Z-Shell)

My question is, how can I test with a command/condition if I am on an interactive, a login or a batch shell?

I am looking for a command or condition (that returns true or false) and that I could also place on an if statement. For example:

if [[ condition ]]
   echo "This is a login shell"
fi

Best Answer

I'm assuming a bash shell, or similar, since there is no shell listed in the tags.

To check if you are in an interactive shell:

[[ $- == *i* ]] && echo 'Interactive' || echo 'Not interactive'

To check if you are in a login shell:

shopt -q login_shell && echo 'Login shell' || echo 'Not login shell'

By "batch", I assume you mean "not interactive", so the check for an interactive shell should suffice.

Related Solutions

Login Shell vs Non-Login Shell – Key Differences

A login shell is the first process that executes under your user ID when you log in for an interactive session. The login process tells the shell to behave as a login shell with a convention: passing argument 0, which is normally the name of the shell executable, with a - character prepended (e.g. -bash whereas it would normally be bash. Login shells typically read a file that does things like setting environment variables: /etc/profile and ~/.profile for the traditional Bourne shell, ~/.bash_profile additionally for bash^†, /etc/zprofile and ~/.zprofile for zsh^†, /etc/csh.login and ~/.login for csh, etc.

When you log in on a text console, or through SSH, or with su -, you get an interactive login shell. When you log in in graphical mode (on an X display manager), you don't get a login shell, instead you get a session manager or a window manager.

It's rare to run a non-interactive login shell, but some X settings do that when you log in with a display manager, so as to arrange to read the profile files. Other settings (this depends on the distribution and on the display manager) read /etc/profile and ~/.profile explicitly, or don't read them. Another way to get a non-interactive login shell is to log in remotely with a command passed through standard input which is not a terminal, e.g. ssh example.com <my-script-which-is-stored-locally (as opposed to ssh example.com my-script-which-is-on-the-remote-machine, which runs a non-interactive, non-login shell).

When you start a shell in a terminal in an existing session (screen, X terminal, Emacs terminal buffer, a shell inside another, etc.), you get an interactive, non-login shell. That shell might read a shell configuration file (~/.bashrc for bash invoked as bash, /etc/zshrc and ~/.zshrc for zsh, /etc/csh.cshrc and ~/.cshrc for csh, the file indicated by the ENV variable for POSIX/XSI-compliant shells such as dash, ksh, and bash when invoked as sh, $ENV if set and ~/.mkshrc for mksh, etc.).

When a shell runs a script or a command passed on its command line, it's a non-interactive, non-login shell. Such shells run all the time: it's very common that when a program calls another program, it really runs a tiny script in a shell to invoke that other program. Some shells read a startup file in this case (bash runs the file indicated by the BASH_ENV variable, zsh runs /etc/zshenv and ~/.zshenv), but this is risky: the shell can be invoked in all sorts of contexts, and there's hardly anything you can do that might not break something.

^† I'm simplifying a little, see the manual for the gory details.

Shell Terminology – What is an Interactive Shell?

An interactive shell is simply any shell process that you use to type commands, and get back output from those commands. That is, a shell with which you interact.

So, your login shell is interactive, as are any other shells you start manually, as described in the excerpt you quoted in your question. By contrast, when you run a shell script, a non-interactive shell is started that runs the commands in the script, and then exits when the script finishes.

The Bourne shell can be used as an interactive shell, just like bash or tcsh. In fact, many systems, such as FreeBSD, use sh as the default user shell. Modern shells like bash, zsh, tcsh, etc have many features that Bourne shell doesn't have, that make them more comfortable and convenient for interactive use (command history, completion, etc).

Interactive non-login shells (that is, shells you start manually from another shell or by opening a terminal window) don't read your .login or .profile files. These are only read and executed by login shells (shells started by the login system process, or by your X display manager), so the commands and settings they contain are only applied once, at the beginning of your login session. So, when you start a terminal, the shell that it spawns for you does not read your login files (.login for c-style shells, .profile for bourne style shells), but it does read the .cshrc, .bashrc etc files.