Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Changing root users' shell in Mac OSX Leopard 10.5

Leopard changes the way users are managed on Leopard. Some online resources say you have to enable root, then you can change the users' shell via the System Preference, however that didn't work for me.

Directory Utility never connected to any directory, and thus didn't work as a solution for Enable Root. The solution here is to use dsenableroot on the command line.

Then the obvious sledgehammer for editing users accounts, vipw, didn't work. The next obvious tool for editing the shell was chsh and that did the job.