LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 23:31:18 +0930

tcsh does not work as root shell in SuSE 7.1??

Maybe this is a problem with other distributions too,
because it should be distribution independent.

Here's the problem:

I log in as root and type "chsh", and
type in "tcsh". Then I can't get back in as
root because I should have typed "/bin/tcsh".
Okay, luckily I had a remote login from another
terminal (using triple-DES to get from the 
sitting room to the kitchen - after all, there
may be a "device" attached to my ethernet cable!).
So I change that shell to /bin/tcsh.
But now I get the same sort of thing:

--------------------------------------------
ferret /home/akenning> su -l
Password:
su: cannot run tcsh: No such file or directory
--------------------------------------------

But....

--------------------------------------------
ferret /root# file /bin/tcsh
/bin/tcsh: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped 
ferret /root# ls -l /bin/tcsh
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       794214 Jan 19 19:03 /bin/tcsh 
--------------------------------------------

Yes, the file is there.
Is it in /etc/shells?

--------------------------------------------
ferret /root# cat < /etc/shells
/bin/ash
/bin/bash
/bin/bash1
/bin/csh
/bin/false
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/true
/usr/bin/csh
/usr/bin/ksh
/usr/bin/passwd
/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/rbash
/usr/bin/tcsh
/usr/bin/zsh   
-------------------------------------------

Looks okay to me.
Not only that - I already use tcsh for my user logins.
And they all work fine.

So maybe there's some global tcsh initialisation file
that has a bad command?

The file /etc/csh.cshrc contains these lines:

------------------------------------------
if ( "$uid" == "0" ) then
    setenv LS_OPTIONS '-a -N --color=tty -T 0';
else
    setenv LS_OPTIONS '-N --color=tty -T 0';
endif 
------------------------------------------

I don't think that this should make any difference.

So it looks like there is no reason why root should
have a problem running the "tcsh" shell.

=================================================
I should also mention that I tried this:

su --shell=/bin/bash

but this kept giving me the message about "tcsh"
not being defined.
So it looks like if you get a wrong shell with
"chsh" as root, then you can never get back in - without
rebooting into single-user mode.
This seems like a pretty serious problem to me.

Can anyone throw any light on these issues?
Is there a similar problem with RH 7.1?

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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