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Rodrigo Sasaki
Asked: 2014-05-23 08:41:46 +0800 CST

How to fix symbolic links after switching from Bash to ZSH

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I had bash as my default shell even though I was only using zsh.

I always started it myself by opening the terminal and typing zsh.

Today I decided to use it as my default shell. So I found this link and ran the following command

sudo chsh -s $(which zsh) john

where john is my user.

It all worked fine until I tried accessing my bank's website and noticed that the symbolic link I had created for the Java Chrome Plugin didn't work anymore.

I tried deleting it and creating a new one via zsh with this command:

sudo ln -s /opt/jre1.7.0_55/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

but it didn't work. Should I do something different now that I'm using zsh? How do I get my symbolic links working again?

bash

2 Answers

  1. First of all, there is absolutely no reason to run chsh with sudo! Next time, just run

    chsh -s $(which bash)

    There is also absolutely no reason to use sudo ln. Links are world read/write/executable by every one. Now, the links you have created have nothing to do with the shell you sued. There is absolutely no reason why changing your shell would affect them. If you can't access a link, the problem is elsewhere.

    Anyway, just run 

    ln -s /opt/jre1.7.0_55/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

    That will create a link called libnpjp2.so which will be in your current directory and point to /opt/jre1.7.0_55/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so. I very much doubt that's what you want to do but that's what you seem to be asking for.

    If for whatever reason the commands above don't work. please edit your question and tell us precisely how they failed. A simple "did not work" is not very useful. Were there any error messages? Is a broken link created? What went wrong?

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  2. Without clarification about the errors that your browser is experiencing, I can only speculate, but here goes:

    It seems entirely likely that your ~/.bashrc was setting certain environment variables and exporting them. When you then would invoke zsh manually, it would (as a child process of your bash shell) inherit those environment variables.

    It would behoove you to investigate precisely which environment variables are being set when your initial bash session is started, before switching to zsh.

    To do this, first invoke bash:

    $ bash

    Then examine your environment variables:

    $ set

    This output will be long. You may wish to pipe through a pager like more or less. Because you are experiencing problems with java, you may wish to verify that your JAVA_HOME environment variable is properly set in zsh. From bash, do:

    $ echo $JAVA_HOME

    Then exit from that bash session and verify that JAVA_HOME is correctly set in zsh by issuing the same echo command again.

    If these do not match, you'll want to set it in your ~/.zshrc which you can do very easily by going back into bash and then echoing the variable contents into your .zshrc like this:

    $ bash
$ echo "export JAVA_HOME=" $JAVA_HOME >> .zshrc
$ exit
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