The other day I got a new Apple M1 processor chip (I really don’t like there’s only two ‘USB-4’ ports and the ‘Magic bar’ bothers me!). But, anyways when I opened my terminal i noticed the below message and wanted to change default shell to bash for this macOS Bir Sur.

The default interactive shell is now zsh.
To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.

I got used to bash on my nice old friend macOS High Sierra. So, I found a way to change default shell to bash for it. Before changing this I brewed one of my favorite Latin America coffees from Honduras.

https://cocotu.com/latin-america-coffee-culture/honduras-coffee-harvest-pictures-2021/

How Change Default Shell to bash macOS Big

This is very easy to do:

  1. Open your terminal
  2. List available shells by typing: cat /etc/shells
  3. To change your account to use bash type: chsh -s /bin/bash
  4. Close your terminal
  5. Open your terminal and verify that bash is your default shell running: echo $SHELL or printf "%s\n" "$SHELL"
  6. You should see the following output: /bin/bash

Find out your current bash version

Simple, type this command in your terminal:

bash --version

Hope this quick tutorial was helpful. See my other quick tips on Docker. Also, contact me if you have any questions and check out my shop to grab inspirational coffee mugs and T-Shirts. Thanks!

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2 Comments

  1. this didn’t work!

    It changed the shell in the existing terminal, but when I opened a new terminal it reverted to zsh!

    1. Hello Kevin, sorry for the late reply. I know this also happened to me and I was able to fix it. Did you change the setting in your Terminal’s preferences too?

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