When the shell-out wont...

[Pavel Tsekov]

Hello,

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Reynir Stefansson wrote:

> ...check your "/etc/passwd".
>
> In my case, I could shell out as root, but not as a user. Finally, after
> much racking of brain and tearing of hair (as if I wasn't bald enough
> already!), I tracked it down to my password file. The shell field for the
> username was empty.
>
> MC uses (it says) first $SHELL and then /etc/passwd to decide what to use as
> subshell. Snag is, if the shell field in /etc/passwd is empty, you may find
> SHELL set to "/bin/sh". MC refuses to shell out (interactive) on that. Hmph.
>
> After comparing root and user environments, I tried "export SHELL=/bin/bash"
> before starting MC. Wonderful wonderful subshell-hagen...

Just for the record - MC's subshell feature currently supports bash, tcsh
and zsh.