shells(5)

shells5

Shell database

Overview

The shells file contains a list of the shells on the system. For each shell a single line should be present, consisting of the shell's path, relative to root.

A hash mark (``#'') indicates the beginning of a comment; subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not interpreted by the routines which search the file. Blank lines are also ignored.

Files

/etc/shells

The shells file resides in /etc.

Releases

87 releases since FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE; the text changed 41 times.

  1. 2.0.5–2.1.7.1
  2. 2.2.2–2.2.8
  3. 2.2.9
  4. 3.0–3.2
  5. 3.3–3.5.1
  6. 4.0–4.2
  7. 4.3
  8. 4.4–4.11
  9. 5.0–6.3
  10. 6.4
  11. 7.0
  12. 7.1
  13. 7.2
  14. 7.3
  15. 7.4
  16. 8.0
  17. 8.1
  18. 8.2
  19. 8.3
  20. 8.4
  21. 9.0
  22. 9.1
  23. 9.2
  24. 9.3
  25. 10.0
  26. 10.1
  27. 10.2
  28. 10.3
  29. 10.4
  30. 11.0
  31. 11.1
  32. 11.2
  33. 11.3
  34. 11.4
  35. 12.0
  36. 12.1
  37. 12.2
  38. 12.3
  39. 12.4
  40. 13.0–13.2
  41. 13.3–14.5
  42. 15.0–16.0

History

The shells file format appeared in 4.3BSD-tahoe.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.