Presenting: chsh

I logged in to the Solaris (9) machine at school the other day and was presented with this:

bash-2.05$

Bash. Gross.
Then it occurred to me that there's no real sane way for a user to change his or her shell on Solaris by default.
Being the diligent late-night hacker with an itch that I am, I solved the problem.

So, without further ado I present to you: chsh.

Usage:

chsh SHELL

or, to list valid shells

chsh -l

if you have the solaris.admin.usermgr role ( it is role aware, so root is unnecessary ) you can change any arbitrary user's shell

chsh -u USERNAME SHELL

It requires root to install, as it is a suid binary, so if you don't already have root-like privileges on the box it's not going to be a lot of help, but your users will thank you. Much like usermod(1M) it only modifies the local /etc/passwd file, so NIS+ and LDAP entries are unaffected.

I'm not sure about the process for getting something integrated in Solaris from scratch, and I'm pretty sure I missed the 2008.11 deadline so it won't be shipping but hopefully you'll see it in a Nevada build and IPS sooner or later.