Hello LinuxQuestions.org,

I've been messing with the chsh command so that I could change the name displayed in my shell before each command is issued, for example trainreq@ubuntu:$. My problem arose when I gave the command 'chsh -s /bin/ksh trainreq', not fully knowing what the results would be. Among this command, I also used 'grep ksh /etc/shells/'. Now, any time I try to open a terminal, be it bash, dash, sh or urxvt, it either just doesn't open or starts spawning instances of urxvt until it has so many open, the computer hangs and then the instances are all closed.

What exactly did I screw up? I really would prefer not having to reinstall, but I can't use Linux without a command line, which I'm sure you guys can sympathize with.

I hope your expertise can aid me in this. Thanks for your time.

I do not know what have you really made, so just a tip:
your shell has a startup file .cshrc, .bashrc or something similar in your home. That contains some strange lines. You can safely rename those files (and login again) to check if it was true - and rename back to the original afterward.