I try to change my login shell in mac os x, i can't find .profile in my home dir, apple must move things around. Can anyone help me with it?

so you want to change from bash to something like zsh or tsh?
Go to system prefrerences->accounts and edit your user account, there some where is an option to change the default shell.

Also there's no .bashrc or .bash_profile shell in your home dir by default in OSx as with some linux dists.

How do you like OSx ?

acutally, i was wondering whether there is a way to do it in command line <-- i am telneting to a os x box, my default is tcsh, i'd like to change it to bash

In my opinion, os x is by far the best os out there, it's stable, powerful and easiest to use (to new computer users in general.) It has full advantage of UNIX, yet it has a basic system structure (Application, System, Library folder) that won't confuse beginners/windows users. For others, you can access the tradiational unix structure via a terminal. On top of everything, apple script can make life even easier --> that's the language that's even easier than vb in my opinion, it's almost pure ENGLISH.

BUT ... (there is always a but to everything, isn't it) it sucks that it only runs on apple hardware and apple will probably never release a windows version like they did with itune. Apple makes very elegant stuff, don't get me wrong, but it's a little pricey for user like me ......

i am used to linux CLI, and spoiled by its nice utilities such as apt, rpm, yast, when i merge to unix, i feel my head is expanding agian <-- like i first did with linux.

Still... i like apple. iPod is awesome, yet i only hope to own one.

is there a /etc/passwd file ?
do you have root access to the box ?

funny that you're defaulted to tsh, I thought the default was bash.

i think the dafault for client os x is bash. I was telneting to os x server, so the default might change to tcsh. honestly, i don't know. I checked around and got to know that there is no easy way in command line to change your default shell. Since apple use netinfo to track down everthing, they probably hide the .profile / equevenlent. I don't think change the line in /etc/passwd will change the default shell, do you? there might be multiple places we need to edit.

The default shell in Mac OS X 10.2.x and earlier is tcsh; in 10.3.x, it is bash. That's true on both client and server versions.