Chsh no changes made

Question: Q: The default interactive shell is now zsh

The default interactive shell is now zsh.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Nov 14, 2019 12:35 PM

All replies

I have received notice from apple to log in to this site. «The default interactive shell is now zsh.» Now what do I do?

Nov 15, 2019 6:28 AM

Nov 15, 2019 6:31 AM

Do you have a question about the switch to zsh?

Nov 14, 2019 6:12 PM

If you do not wish to use Terminal open https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050 and follow the instructions for using System Preferences

Nov 15, 2019 6:32 AM

I was prompted to this site in order to run a different system, whatever that means.

Whatever it is you need please start a different thread. Read Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question first please

Dec 1, 2019 11:04 AM

There’s more to the conversation

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The default interactive shell is now zsh.

Dec 23, 2019 1:06 PM

I have this too. Can someone explain what it is and why I would want to use this? Thank you!

Jan 16, 2020 11:54 AM

It’s just a different shell. A shell is the interactive environment for using the Unix backbone.

You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.

There are several other shells, too

Jan 16, 2020 12:03 PM

No-one has any particular opinions. Apple just made change. If you want it, change to it. If you don’t want it, don’t change to it. I prefer to use their recommendation, you may or may not. Flip a coin.

Jan 16, 2020 2:26 PM

What’s the point of directing to a page that’s useless. waste of time

Jan 24, 2020 2:04 PM

What’s the point of directing to a page that’s useless. waste of time

What’s the point of making a post that doesn’t ask or answer a technical support question?

Seems like more of a waste of time.

I looked at all of the links on this thread and they all seem helpful to me. What was useless about the link you visited?

Jan 24, 2020 6:03 PM

Choose Apple menu >system preferences >user and groups click the lock, type password then ‘CTRL + click’ on user name on the left, click on popup advance options. Choose a shell from ‘login shell’ menu, then click ok to save the changes. Hopes helped.

Jan 29, 2020 9:09 PM

Feb 4, 2020 2:28 PM

It is the login password for your Mac

Feb 4, 2020 2:59 PM

Thank you for your reply. I tried this but nothing happened. The cursor prompt was a key shape and seemed to prevent any entry. Do you have any other ideas. Cheers ajg

Feb 5, 2020 1:03 PM

The password is not shown

do the procedure again. Enter your password again. Press enter

Feb 5, 2020 2:24 PM

Thanks again. I did this but reply is saying : chsh: Credentials could not be verified, username or password is invalid. Credentials could not be verified, username or password is invalid.

I used the same password as allows me to sign on etc. Any suggestions?

Feb 5, 2020 5:11 PM

terminal have been error

Last login: Fri Mar 13 23:35:25 on ttys000

The default interactive shell is now zsh.

Usage: tcprelay.py [OPTIONS] [Host:]RemotePort[:LocalPort] [[Host:]RemotePort[:LocalPort]].

specify buffer size for socket forwarding

specify the path of the usbmuxd socket

oh-my-zsh does not start on mac

I installed oh-my-zsh as suggested in http://ohmyz.sh/. FYI,

Only when I type «zsh» then I can see the oh-my-zsh prompt like:

Also, I tried to change my default shell to zsh:

How can I use directly oh-my-zsh whenever I start mac terminal?

5 Answers 5

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Not only in System Pref>User and Group>. >User profile’s shell settings, but also in Mac’s terminal>Preference>ChosenProfile>Shell section, I had to change /bin/bash to /bin/zsh. after that, it works! Thank you, @RemyJ!

You have to change the default shell to zsh.
To do so use the following command.

I took it from here.
These were the steps I followed when I installed zsh.
I hope it will help you as well.

Also, I tried to change my default shell to zsh: [

that worked fine for me

and changed the Shells open with: option to Default login shell while the command (complete path) set to /bin/zsh.This should solve your problem.

Suppressing «The default interactive shell is now zsh» message in macOS Catalina

The support document the message links to is https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050

How can I hide the verbose logging? I do not want to be reminding that the «default interactive shell is now zsh» every time I open Terminal.

4 Answers 4

I found the solution on reddit. The solution is also mentioned in the «How to use a different shell without changing the default» section of the Apple support article mentioned in the bash warning: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208050/.

Apple’s /bin/bash is fairly antiquated (currently v3.2.57). I just switch to use the bash shipped by homebrew (currently v5.0.18), which will incidentally also remove that deprecation warning.

Or if you have Apple Silicon (e.g. M1):

I found that becoming root, then adding the deprecation suppression in /etc/profile was more reliable. I was already using ZSH and I was getting the warning every time I opened a new console. Terribly annoying. /etc/profile now reads as follows:

I did a bit of digging and found the extra text (I did read the URL given in the message but missed the line for export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1 )

The issue is that the text you see comes from Apple’s version of /bin/bash

strings /bin/bash | grep default shows the text.

So to use bash I would add a newer bash from another source and use that in chsh. I would use a different bash anyway as the Apple version is over 10 years old

Looking at Apple’s code for macOS 11.3 in shell.c (Apple don’t seem to have released it for 11.4 yet)

Apple have added amoungst other additions

So setting BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING will remove this (but see the comment on bash being an old version so I would not advise this)

“The default interactive shell is now zsh” message – Everything you need to know

You may notice a message whenever you open the Terminal that says

Update the system to use zsh as default shell

Alternatively, you can configure the default shell using the graphical interface.

As long as you keep zsh as the default shell, the «The default interactive shell is now zsh» will be hidden. More information about this behavior can be found at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208050.

Hide «The default interactive shell is now zsh» and use bash

This can be quickly done with a single-line command.

Usually the BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING setting in bash_profile alone would do the trick, but a few users reported mixed results, where the «The default interactive shell is now zsh» randomly pops up every once in a while.

In this case, edit /etc/profile as root and add the same line into it to enable the setting system-wide.

Hide «The default interactive shell is now zsh» by upgrading bash

The reason behind the move from bash to zsh is as newer versions of bash are licensed under GPLv3 since version 3.3. Apple has kept clear of using GPLv3 packages in macOS as the license is generally more restrictive to companies like Apple that sign their own code and it includes explicit patent grants, too. Apple is stuck using version 3.2 of bash, which was released way back in 2006.

If you want to keep using bash as well as get rid of the warning message, just switch to use the bash shipped by homebrew (currently v5.0.18), which does not include the piece of code Apple added to show the «The default interactive shell is now zsh» warning

First of all, install homebrew if you haven’t already. Detailed instruction is available at https://docs.brew.sh/Installation. Related : brew: command not found – possible fixes

Once homebrew is installed, run the following one-liner to update bash :

We hope that this guide has helped those of you who want to hide «The default interactive shell is now zsh» in Terminal on macOS, as well as troubleshooting problems with the default bash shell. If you do have questions, feel free to leave a commen below, we would love to hear about your experience. ❤

Why can’t I use zsh?

So I upgraded to Catalina. Actually it’s more like a fresh install, I only copied across the few files I wanted to keep.

The shell is now helpfully telling me:

The information on that page helpfully shows GUI instructions which do not work. Specifically, it says «Control-click your user name in the list of users on the left, then choose Advanced Options.», but Control-click does nothing. So I reported that on the page.

When I use the suggested command instead:

This is different to «Can’t use zsh shell in Catalina» because I get an error message that they don’t.

It’s also different to «chsh: Operation was denied because the current credentials do not have the appropriate privileges» because it seems that in their case, they were using iTerm. I’m using the default Terminal.app.

I have tried it with sudo just for laughs, but of course it does this, which makes perfect sense:

So what’s the deal here? How am I supposed to do it?

Update:

Well this is interesting. Two password prompts, and then a different error message about the parameter being invalid.

This error is new to me, but apparently it’s new to Google as well, so I’m officially a trailblazer!

Update: Happy New Year!

Back in the office again.

Through poking at commands we had determined that Centrify was in use. Centrify comes with an adupdate tool which is supposed to be used to change user information. With the help of IT, we tried it, though, and were still denied, but now it’s more like an error.

First impressions: What is Auto Zone and how do I get out of it?

4 Answers 4

@bmike has already offered the easiest solution, but I wanted to go back to the GUI instructions not working.

I found that Apple’s instructions here can be confusing. Control-Clicking will not do anything unless you first “unlock” the Users & Groups pane, as shown below in the blue box:

Once you have it unlocked, be sure you are clicking in the white-area on the left to access “Advanced Options…” as shown above with the blue arrow.

Then you should be able to access the options, including shell, from the Advanced pane.

If your short name is mike (you can check with whoami or who am i

Or if you know an admin short name and password you could skip the sudo initially

@ me if you still have issues, there are a couple other ways to skin this cat, but I think once you specify the other user and su to root first, you should be set. It should have just worked out of the box, but hopefully we don’t have to go down that rabbit trail.

This is a somewhat speculative answer, on the assumption that your account is coming from an Active Directory domain your Mac is bound to. You can check this by running:

If it prints something like » AppleMetaNodeLocation: /Active Directory/ «, then your account is coming from AD, and this answer might work for you. I say «might» because I don’t have a setup to test properly, and haven’t messed with this stuff for several versions. If it doesn’t print something about «/Active Directory/», this answer is not relevant.

Before proceeding further, I’d make a record of your current AD binding configuration. Run:

. and save its output somewhere, so you can refer to it if you need to put things back the way they were. If it doesn’t print anything, then there’s something weirder going on and I wouldn’t recommend proceeding until you know what it is. It’ll probably list something like » Default user Shell = /bin/bash «; if so, I’m pretty sure that’s the root of your problem. To change this, run:

. and then probably reboot to make sure change takes effect. Oh, and check your Terminal preferences to make sure they’re not overriding that (see here).