Customizing Your Computing Environment with Unix Commands

Now that you know what a login shell is and about the various shell programs available, let's find out how to identify your default shell program.

To find your default shell program, enter the following command at the shell prompt:

echo $SHELL

The output from this command shows a directory path along with the filename of the default shell. In the example, you can see that the default shell is bash.

[username@dt-login02 ~]$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
[username@dt-login02 ~]$

Typically, you can find which other usable shells are installed on your HPC Cluster by viewing the /bin directory.

Exercise

Note: This exercise assumes that you have logged into your HPC Cluster and are ready to enter commands into your login shell.

Enter the command into your login shell to identify which shell program is your default.