Question

What is the *nix command to view a user’s default login shell?

I can change the default login shell with chsh, but I don’t know how to get what is the user’s default shell.

Pseudocode

$ get-shell
/usr/bin/zsh

Answer 1

The canonical way to query the /etc/passwd file for this information is with getent. You can parse getent output with standard tools such as cut to extract the user’s login shell. For example:

$ getent passwd $LOGNAME | cut -d: -f7
/bin/bash