15 Jun 11 Why HP-UX root shell needs to be /sbin/sh
Thanks to Jibn Antony of the Best Buy IDC team for validating.
So who cares what the root shell is? You do if you try to boot your system into single user mode with root shell changed to a shared executable shell, you will find out the hard way. The system won’t boot.
root@dxd22hxd# ls -l /bin/ksh
-r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 538632 Nov 12 2007 /bin/ksh*
root@dxd22hxd# ldd /bin/ksh
libnsl.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libnsl.so.1
libxti.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libxti.so.1
libc.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libc.so.1
libc.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libc.so.1
libxti.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libxti.so.1
libdl.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libdl.so.1
root@dxd22hxd# ldd /sbin/sh
ldd: “/sbin/sh” is not a shared executable.
root@dxd22hxd# ls -l /sbin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1402600 Oct 23 2007 /sbin/sh*
-r-xr-xr-x 2 bin bin 538632 Nov 12 2007 /bin/ksh*
root@dxd22hxd# ldd /bin/ksh
libnsl.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libnsl.so.1
libxti.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libxti.so.1
libc.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libc.so.1
libc.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libc.so.1
libxti.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libxti.so.1
libdl.so.1 => /usr/lib/hpux32/libdl.so.1
root@dxd22hxd# ldd /sbin/sh
ldd: “/sbin/sh” is not a shared executable.
root@dxd22hxd# ls -l /sbin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 1402600 Oct 23 2007 /sbin/sh*
Note that /bin/ksh requires /usr to be mounted which is not the case with single user or lv maintenance mode.
