Saturday, November 19, 2016

When chsh simple does not work

When chsh simple does not work


I got into this problem lately in a Live environment of the new Ubuntu MATE release where no matter how many times I change the password using sudo passwd it simply does not effect chsh. So, when I type in

chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh
It asks for the password. And when I type the password in, it does not work. It simply says "PAM: Authentication Failure". Ok, so go for Googling. Later, I found out that all user home and shell infos are stored in a file located by /etc/passwd. Now you need root to do this. So how do you get root? For a Live system, thats simple. just type in

sudo -i
It should give you the # prompt so youre root now. Now just open the file using your favorite editor like

nano /etc/passwd
Then find your user name and change the string right after the last : on that line. Done. Reboot and go. For now, I seriously dont know why chsh didnt work. :( anybody have any clues?

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