Switching between the different shells

Exercise 1

Switching between the different shells

Your “default” interactive shell is stored in an environmental variable named “SHELL” and the “current” interactive shell is stored in another variable, named “$0”

To Find what shell you are working in

1. Log in to the computer as root
2. Type:



What is your current shell? And what is it called?

To find out the shells available on the system

1. The list of all the shells are usually stored in the “/etc/shells” file. Display the contents
of that file. Type:

To temporarily switch your shell

1. You will change your shell to the C – shell. Type




2. Your shell has changed. To show this type :



Write down the output?


3. Return to your parent shell. Type



4. Type exit again. What happened?

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