Shellchooser

Shellchooser is a Bash script meant to run as a users shell, althouh it is not a shell of it's own, it's an interactive chooser for different shells. The shells avaliable to choose from in the script is Bash, Ash and Csh. It uses dialog to display a nice menu. Since the script is meant to run before the user has a sane environment all binaries used by the script is being run from variables. The variables for the binaries are generated by a loop which uses which to get the path for the binaries. The which command is hardcoded and might need to be changed on different systems.

Usage

Bundled with shellchooser is a small Makefile to ease installation of the script. Simply run make install to install shellchooser.sh into /bin and the profile/bashrc/cshrc files into /etc/shellchooser/. The installation will also put /bin/shellchooser.sh into /etc/shells so that system utilities won't complain about it not being a valid shell. Note that make install will fail if you don't have all the required shells install on your system. The make command will tell you which shells you are missing so that you can install them on your system. See below how to install shells on some various systems. To uninstall all of the files from the system including removing shellchooser.sh from /etc/shells simply run make uninstall from this directory. Simply running make will print some short usage of the Makefile and which shells your system have installed (and which shells you should have installed).

Install Bash, Ash and Csh

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install <shell>

OpenSuSE

zypper install <shell>

Specifications

Two simple flowcharts shows how this script is built, what it does and which files are installed/uninstalled with Makefile. The two flowcharts resides in this directory and are called flowchart_makefile.png and flowchart_shellchooser.png.