What is the *nix command to view a user's default login shell

Question

What is the *nix command to view a user\'s default login shell?

I can change the default login shell with chsh, but I don\'t know how to get what is the

Answer 1

The command is finger.

[ken@hero ~]$ finger ken
Login: ken                      Name: Kenneth Berland
Directory: /home/ken                    Shell: /bin/tcsh
On since Fri Jun 15 16:11 (PDT) on pts/0 from 70.35.47.130
   1 hour 59 minutes idle
On since Fri Jun 15 18:17 (PDT) on pts/2 from 70.35.47.130
New mail received Fri Jun 15 18:16 2012 (PDT)
     Unread since Fri Jun 15 17:05 2012 (PDT)
No Plan.

Answer 2

I think what you are looking for is this:

#!/bin/bash
grep "^$1" /etc/passwd | cut -d ':' -f 7

Save that as get-shell somewhere in your path (probably ~/bin) and then call it like:

get-shell userfoo

Answer 3

The canonical way to query the /etc/passwd file for this information is with getent. You can parse getent output with standard tools such as cut to extract the user's login shell. For example:

$ getent passwd $LOGNAME | cut -d: -f7
/bin/bash

Answer 4

SHELL variable is used to represent user's current shell

echo $SHELL

Answer 5

The login shell is defined in /etc/passwd. So you can do:

grep username /etc/passwd