Picking shells in OS X: bash vs zsh
The command line looks boring enough that you’d think it was the same everywhere, but it isn’t true! There are actually a handful of different varieties of the command line – technically speaking, they’re called shells.
Back in the day, the default shell in OS X was something called bash.
Then, during some OS X update, the default shell suddenly became zsh (or zshell)!
Does this matter? Do you care? No, not really! Bash and zsh operate exactly the same as far as you’re concerned, but there’s one gotcha: it can really screw things up when you try to install things on your computer. This mostly has to do with startup files, and making sure things go in the right place.
Startup files
When you start up Terminal, it runs a couple files to set things up. It’ll adjust your PATH to let your computer know where to look for things, it’ll set up pyenv to figure out what version of Python it should be using, it’ll do blah blah whatever else you tell it to do.
The way it knows what to set up is startup files or initialization files. I don’t have an internet connection right now so let’s be honest: I made both of those terms up.
Based on what shell you’re using, different startup files get run!
- If you’re using bash, it runs
.bash_profileand.bashrc - If you’re using zshell, it runs
.zprofileand.zshrc
The best is when your computer suggests you switch from bash to zshell, and as a result you lose all of your settings. It’s cute!
Figuring things out
I have a YouTube video about this! It’s oddly popular because this issue causes problems for every human on the planet. How to fix bash_profile/PATH not working in OS X Catalina Terminal by using zshrc instead