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These notes are primarily aimed at Solaris 10 system administrators and comprise our hints and tips to generally make life easier.

The Shell

The default shell is generally the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) which can cause irritation, especially if you've come from a Linux background. I generally set the default shell to Bash (/bin/bash) which is also supplied with Solaris 10, but not widely noted in the various books available.

To change the shell for existing users, edit the /etc/passwd file and change the occurrences of /bin/sh to /bin/bash for the users you wish to edit.

N.B. Despite some books listing it, Solaris 10 doesn't allow the default shell to be changed via the useradd -D -s /bin/bash command, so if you want to permanently edit the default shell for new users you need to manually edit the /usr/sadm/defadduser file and change the defshell=... entry to the value you require.

The default PATH

Solaris has a fairly restrictive default PATH variable so I find it useful to extend it in order to pick up some of the other binaries installed with Solaris 10. There are two main ways of achieving this, and both depend upon which shell you're using.

You can either enter a PATH= line in the main /etc/.login file and subsequently expand it in each users .XXXrc file (where XXX depends upon the shell in use) or just put the required path in the relevant user .XXXrc file.

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