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Is there a way to set fish as the default shell in ubuntu netbook remix? I put in my .bashrc to run fish, which works fine, but ubuntu recognizes it as fish running inside bash, which means that when I try to close the shell it warns me that a task is still running.

It doesn't pop up as a new application, so I can't pin it to my bar like a normal app.

muru
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Xodarap
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5 Answers5

240

You can set fish as your default shell by running

chsh -s $(which fish)

To do so for another user, just add the username at the end of the command, and use sudo.

Then log out and back in.

(To set it back to bash, you need to use Fish syntax of course, like this chsh -s (which bash))

adius
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ajmitch
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usermod -s /usr/bin/fish username

Must be run as root though.

This will change the shell permanently for the specified user.

sweetfa
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    I know it's not Ubuntu, but I wanted to comment: I was on CentOS, and I was getting an Authentication Failed error trying to change the shell with a non-root user and after extensively searching to try and figure it out, this was the only thing that worked. Thanks! – CWSpear Nov 03 '13 at 04:50
  • Yes it will work on most unix flavours that have usermod and fish for a shell, or change the shell to whatever flavour you wish – sweetfa Nov 11 '13 at 07:57
  • I did that and now the terminal doesn't start anymore. I get "There was an error creating the child process for this terminal", "Failed to execute child process "/usr/bin/fish" (Input/output error)". How can I undo that? – ptkato Dec 30 '15 at 21:42
  • Issue the same command as root but use bash instead of fish as the shell. – sweetfa Dec 31 '15 at 01:10
  • @ptkato In case you are running Ubuntu via WSL, go to Powershell and run wsl ~ -e bash, this will open up bash. Now, to set bash as the default shell, enter sudo usermod -s usr/bin/fish <username>. – Aniruddha Feb 25 '23 at 13:38
29

I just added the line fish to the end of my .bashrc.

KD100
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    That's the simplest and best solution, IMO ;) – electronix384128 Nov 22 '16 at 04:32
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    Sorry, but its not efficient. :) It will load your fish shell but on top of your bash running. – M. Junaid Salaat Mar 17 '17 at 10:13
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    Why does bash need to be efficient? @M.JunaidSalaat – codenamejames Jul 26 '17 at 19:34
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    From the first glance this seems like a dirty hack, but after a while of using my pc with fish set as the default shell with chsh I came back to this solution. Some programs assume that you're using bash and will crash because of using bash syntax on fish. So far I faced such problems in i3wm and matlab. – Naheel May 21 '18 at 14:36
  • @codenamejames: It's not that bash needs to be efficient, or that those few milliseconds matter, but it's a case of nothing to lose, so why not do it correct? Especially here where we are giving advice to other people. We should know better – swalog May 19 '19 at 14:45
  • I see this a bad practice for "defaulting" a shell. Bash and Fish have different syntaxes. Bash for example declare variables as VAR=some_var and fish as set VAR some_var. There is no .bashrc for fish (https://fishshell.com/docs/current/faq.html). I expect close terminal when run exit command. Running fish from bash, after exit command I got back to bash terminal. – Enrique René Jan 22 '21 at 02:17
  • This will break your system. The desktop can not be displayed normally and the scp command won't work neither. – haolee Apr 13 '21 at 01:28
  • @M.JunaidSalaat By using exec (which is POSIX compliant), the command argument will replace the shell (i.e. will be executed with execve() system call). Bash will no longer be running. Environment variables are preserved, though. – psqli Dec 17 '21 at 12:18
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I agree with the chsh is the correct answer. However:

If you run chsh and get error 

/usr/local/bin/fish: non-standard shell

simply add the fish binary location to /etc/shells.

Found here.

A.B.
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jackbravo
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11

In /etc/shells, add /usr/local/bin/fish:

# List of acceptable shells for chpass(1).
# Ftpd will not allow users to connect who are not using
# one of these shells.

/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh
/usr/local/bin/fish

Then chsh -s /usr/local/bin/fish.

Dorian
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