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How to change 'echo $SHELL' to '\bin\zsh' on MacOS

I have recently upgraded from Catlina to Big Sur and changed shell to zsh but when I echo $SHELL it still shows /bin/bash how do I change this

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Solution

  • I would either put a

    SHELL==zsh

    or

    SHELL=$0:a

    into your ~/.zshenv (the difference between these two forms is explained below). This has several advantages:

    • This file is only processed by zsh, interactive and non-interactive, so there is no risk that this setting is picked up by a different shell.

    • By setting it as a shell variable and not an environment variable, child processes written in different shells (bash, ksh, sh, ...) can set the SHELL variable by themselves, if they like.

    • By using the form =zsh, zsh expands the word zsh to the full path of the shell. This assumes that zsh is in your PATH, which is reasonable anyway.

    • If you decide to go for the alternatie form, $0:a, instead of =zsh, you are assigning to SHELL the path of the current zsh. This makes a difference, if you have several zsh versions installed on your system, and want to make sure that SHELL is set to the one which is currently running.