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Leonardo Petrucci
Asked: 2019-12-10 12:56:19 +0800 CST

Changing shell for root

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I've been following this guide to switch my shell to zhs. However when I get to running this:

chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh root

I get the following error:

You may not change the shell for 'root'.

Is this intended to happen or am I get something wrong? Should I not be changing my root's shell?

command-line gnome-terminal bash gnome-shell

2 Answers

  1. You should log in by a root user (from the terminal):

    • Type su or sudo su.
    • Run the command chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh root.
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  2. You can do that, but I would strongly advise against it: If anything goes horribly wrong, you can't log in as root anymore. Please consider that the zsh package is not installed by default, and IIRC it's also not by default in /etc/shells (I might be wrong there). You might get into situations where the shell that you configured for root is not available.

    I love zsh, but for my root account I always leave the default bash. When I need to work as root for more than a handful of commands, I simply do

    sudo zsh

    and hey presto, I am root with my favourite zsh.

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