Saturday, October 12, 2013

Terminal does not have history and not showing path?

What happen when a new user's terminal (xterm, lxterminal etc):

  1. does not display any path (only show $>)
  2. does not support Up key for recall previous command?
It is because the new user is using /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash. To solve this, simply do sudo chsh, then key in /bin/bash when prompted to choose an option.

Restart the terminal then you should be able to get all the features back.

The root cause for this is nothing is specified when the user is being created using command line. Be sure to specify to use /bin/bash to avoid this.