Shell is a command line interpreter. There are various shells in Linux. The bash shell is integrated in many Linux distributions. There also are ksh, zsh, tcsh. This tutorial provides 3 methods to check which shell currently using in Linux.
Method 1 - $0 special parameter
The $0
is a special parameter that contains the name of the currently used shell. Use echo
command to print value:
echo $0
Output example:
bash
Method 2 - ps command
The ps
command allows to get a snapshot of the current processes. The -p
option allows to select the process by ID (PID). The $$
is a special parameter that contains the process ID of the currently used shell.
ps -p $$
Output example:
PID TTY TIME CMD
1422 pts/0 00:00:00 bash
Method 3 - /etc/passwd file
The /etc/passwd
is a text file which contains details about users such as username, user ID, group ID, shell, etc. Each line in a file contains 7 fields. The last field is shell.
grep "^$USER" /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f7
Output example:
/bin/bash
Leave a Comment
Cancel reply