How to change default shell to ZSH - chsh says "invalid shell"

Question

I installed ZSH on a VM of mine, where I compiled it from source. The location of ZSH is /usr/local/bin/zsh when I run chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh it outputs chsh: /usr/local/bin/zsh is an invalid shell. I also tried this with sudo as well. How can I change this?

Answer 1

Add zsh to /etc/shells:

command -v zsh | sudo tee -a /etc/shells

You can now use chsh to set zsh as shell:

sudo chsh -s "$(command -v zsh)" "${USER}"

See this documentation: Changing your login shell

Answer 2

You need to add /usr/local/bin/zsh to /etc/shells.

Answer 3

First, check if zsh is listed as a valid shell by

cat /etc/shells

If zsh is not listed, install it. For example, if you use apt

sudo apt-get install zsh

Do, step 1 again and see the path of zsh. In my case, both /usr/bin/zsh and /usr/zsh is listed. As @Stéphane Chazelas mentioned in the comment, if you like to compile and install the shell from scratch, be sure to add the path in /etc/shells.

Change the shell using

chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh

From man page:

-s, --shell SHELL The name of the user's new login shell. Setting this field to blank causes the system to select the default login shell.

Logout and login again.

Answer 4

I am running Ubuntu 21 on ARM64 (Raspberry Pi 4), and there is more to this issue than the answers reveal. I installed zsh and ksh and tried changing my shell to zsh and to ksh using chsh, and both times I got the "invalid shell" message. I checked /etc/shells, and that file contained both shells. I tried the chsh command using just the bare shell names (zsh, ksh) and also using the full path names as listed in /etc/shells. I couldn't get it to work. Finally, out of frustration I just changed my shell in the /etc/passwd file, and then it worked. Later, I learned that there are two different ways of invoking chsh. What I was trying was: chsh -s , which gave the error message. But chsh can also be invoked by simply typing chsh . This opens an interactive session:

$ chsh
Password: 
Changing the login shell for tom
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
    Login Shell [/bin/ksh93]: /usr/bin/zsh

When I do it this way, it works. However, entering the command as chsh -s still doesn't work.