Login problem

cykoburn · 11-29-2004, 06:53 PM

I recently installed Slackware 10 and was able to log in fine with root. i think i messed something up because i was trying to add a new user but did not use the adduser command. instead i just used chfn changed name info and used chsh and changed that to a different name.
Now when i try to log in it seems to log in fine but the comes up with the error
Cannot execute cykoburn (the name i changed in chsh): no such file or directory

nilleso · 11-29-2004, 07:18 PM

chsh is used to change a users existing shell to something else (ie. bash, ksh, csh .... and not an arbitrary or a users name). It is therefore not used as a title, but rather it is changing the real shell functionality. Check out man chsh or 'chsh -l' to get a list of the available shells and then change it back to, for example, bash
cheers

nilleso · 11-29-2004, 07:21 PM

If the -l option is not available, just look in /etc/shells to see what are the available shells. You can google to see the differences between each. You're probably best to use bash
for example:
$ cat /etc/shells
# /etc/shells: valid login shells
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/shells,v 1.5 2003/07/15 20:36:32 azarah Exp $
/bin/sh
/bin/bash
/bin/tcsh
/bin/csh
/bin/esh
/bin/ksh
/bin/zsh
/bin/sash

cykoburn · 11-29-2004, 07:23 PM

well the problem is i can't really log in at all. i logs in for like a second then right back out as if i never had. i know it logged in because i tells me i got mail and the failures since last log in

nilleso · 11-29-2004, 08:30 PM

Only root can fix this problem and if you cannot login as root (because your pointing to a shell that doesn't exist) you need to search these forums for how to recover the root password. (or somehow recover your /etc/passwd file)

Good luck... learning new stuff hurts sometimes

but you'll remember not to do this one nextime

cykoburn · 11-29-2004, 09:02 PM

yea i solved the problem by reinstalling Linux