Finding information about the current shell

atirya_yodha · 03-18-2004, 08:13 AM

How do I find out the information about the current shell ?
ie , whether it is bash,csh or korn shell etc ?
The reason i ask this question is that i want to make the vi
editor commands to work on the command line . I tried using
set -o vi
but the shell says "set: Variable name must begin with a letter."
Does set -o vi work only with bash ?
I wanted to find out what is my current shell and accordingly make
vi editor commands to work on the shell command line for editing

Thanks,
Athirya

snacky · 03-18-2004, 08:18 AM

1. "grep `whoami` /etc/passwd" to find out what shell you run at login.
2. If you're the only one on the system, "ps |grep sh" would be a reasonable way to find out what shell you're running at the moment.

slakmagik · 03-18-2004, 10:19 AM

Code:

~
1008>> echo $0                                                                 
bash

~
1009>> set -o vi

Works fine with my bash - maybe you're not using bash. It probably is bash-specific.

mightymouse · 03-18-2004, 01:30 PM

most shells have a number of environment variables set to provided information about them. You can find out what shell you are using by typing "echo $SHELL". If you are using bach, then have a look at the man page, specifically the "bash variables" section.