homebrew
. Here’s a couple of steps you need to do to make that your default. Read on, for how to do it.zsh
version:zsh
:dscl
command is a command line utility for performing operations on the Directory Services database.dscl
command is a command line utility for performing operations on the Directory Services database..
is short for localhost
, and the $USER
variable expands to your username./etc/shells
to find out what shells your OS X knows about. It’s not necessary to view or append this file, if you’re setting your shell with dscl
like we’ll do below. It seems that /etc/shells
is used to specify allowable user shells for users connecting via FTP, and it used to need to be edited to include any new shells, that you were going to change to using chsh
.brew
installed, use brew install zsh
to install./usr/local
for OS X users to install packages to and it’s already in your system path, so that’s where brew
installs. Confirm it:brew
commands to confirm the details about the package:zsh
that brew installed, use dscl
.which
again, you’ll see the system is recognizing the one you installed:/usr/local/bin/zsh
to /etc/shells
, then use chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh
to change to it./usr/local/bin/zsh
to /etc/shells
, then use chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh
to change to it.zsh
that is first in your path is now the upgraded version from brew
.echo $0
. It should return -zsh
.plist
file for that app, and ignore the user shell./usr/local
, among other things. Since this is where brew
keeps its files, you’ll likely need to reset security on it by running the following command:brew
using brew update
or brew upgrade
, it will inform you if there’s a problem with permissions on /usr/local
.zsh
and want some cool tools for it, check out Oh My Zsh!, an open source framework for managing zsh
config.dscl
. Left information about /etc/shells
and chsh
in as an aside. Added information about selecting the shell in Terminal Preferences.zsh
in OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan. It’s zsh 5.0.8 (x86_64-apple-darwin15.0)
, which is still out of date and in fact, an even more pronounced version lag compared to the v5.2
now being distributed via brew
. Added how to check which shell you actually are using, and a couple points about handling upgrades.chsh
take effect.