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I want to change my shell from the default bash shell to zsh on my Amazon EC2 instances. How do I go about doing it? Thanks!

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1 Answer

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Try using the chsh command.

e.g.

chsh -s /bin/zsh

You can confirm the location of zsh by running whereis zsh, or alternatively simply run

chsh -s $(which zsh)

If you want to change the shell for a user account other than the one you're logged into, you'll need to run it as root, so to change john's shell, do:

sudo chsh -s $(which zsh) john
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I did try that, but with the root user!! My AMI Image has ubuntu rather than root. Had to switch to ubuntu user to change the shell! Thanks for the hint :) – Paddy Jan 11 '11 at 11:45
@Paddy if you are root you can change it for another user by running chsh -s /bin/zsh username. – John T Jan 11 '11 at 11:47
Awesome :) Much easier. Thanks for that info too. – Paddy Jan 11 '11 at 11:48
I'm getting: chsh: /usr/local/bin/zsh is an invalid shell – We are the World Feb 26 at 4:13

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