How to Tell Which Unix Shell I am Using

How to determine the current interactive shell that I'm in (command-line)

• There are three approaches to finding the name of the current shell's executable:

  Please note that all three approaches can be fooled if the executable of the shell is /bin/sh, but it's really a renamed bash, for example (which frequently happens).

  Thus your second question of whether ps output will do is answered with "not always".

  1. echo $0 - will print the program name... which in the case of the shell is the actual shell.

  2. ps -ef | grep $$ | grep -v grep - this will look for the current process ID in the list of running processes. Since the current process is the shell, it will be included.

     This is not 100% reliable, as you might have other processes whose ps listing includes the same number as shell's process ID, especially if that ID is a small number (for example, if the shell's PID is "5", you may find processes called "java5" or "perl5" in the same grep output!). This is the second problem with the "ps" approach, on top of not being able to rely on the shell name.

  3. echo $SHELL - The path to the current shell is stored as the SHELL variable for any shell. The caveat for this one is that if you launch a shell explicitly as a subprocess (for example, it's not your login shell), you will get your login shell's value instead. If that's a possibility, use the ps or $0 approach.

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• If, however, the executable doesn't match your actual shell (e.g. /bin/sh is actually bash or ksh), you need heuristics. Here are some environmental variables specific to various shells:

  • $version is set on tcsh

  • $BASH is set on bash

  • $shell (lowercase) is set to actual shell name in csh or tcsh

  • $ZSH_NAME is set on zsh

  • ksh has $PS3 and $PS4 set, whereas the normal Bourne shell (sh) only has $PS1 and $PS2 set. This generally seems like the hardest to distinguish - the only difference in the entire set of environment variables between sh and ksh we have installed on Solaris boxen is $ERRNO, $FCEDIT, $LINENO, $PPID, $PS3, $PS4, $RANDOM, $SECONDS, and $TMOUT.

How can I tell which Unix shell I am using?

Try:

echo $0

This often works across a range of shells.

Which shell I am using in mac

macOS's Terminal allows you to specify the shell in its preferences. By default, it is set to use your login shell, but it looks like you've overridden it to use Bash.

In the General tab of Terminal's preferences, set it to "Default login shell," to prevent your login shell from being overridden:

Also, make sure the "Run command" checkbox is not checked in the Shell tab of your profiles' settings:

How do I tell what type my shell is

This is what I use in my .profile:

# .profile is sourced at login by sh and ksh. The zsh sources .zshrc and
# bash sources .bashrc. To get the same behaviour from zsh and bash as well
# I suggest "cd; ln -s .profile .zshrc; ln -s .profile .bashrc".
# Determine what (Bourne compatible) shell we are running under. Put the result
# in $PROFILE_SHELL (not $SHELL) so further code can depend on the shell type.

if test -n "$ZSH_VERSION"; then
  PROFILE_SHELL=zsh
elif test -n "$BASH_VERSION"; then
  PROFILE_SHELL=bash
elif test -n "$KSH_VERSION"; then
  PROFILE_SHELL=ksh
elif test -n "$FCEDIT"; then
  PROFILE_SHELL=ksh
elif test -n "$PS3"; then
  PROFILE_SHELL=unknown
else
  PROFILE_SHELL=sh
fi

It does not make fine distinctions between ksh88, ksh95, pdksh or mksh etc., but in more than ten years it has proven to work for me as designed on all the systems I were at home on (BSD, SunOS, Solaris, Linux, Unicos, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, MicroStation, Cygwin.)

I don't see the need to check for csh in .profile, as csh sources other files at startup.
Any script you write does not need to check for csh vs Bourne-heritage because you explicitly name the interpreter in the shebang line.

What shell am I in?

I want something that has the same feel of uname, pwd, whoami. Just a plain utility with a simple output.

So apparently the conclusion is that the tool I want does not exist, and there's no simple cross-platform way to go about this.

Some answers here work fine on Linux.

How can I know which shell I am using?

You ca try the following command

which bash

at a shell. Then put

#!<the output of which bash>

How can I find my shell version using a Linux command?

This will do it:

$SHELL --version

In my case, the output is:

zsh 5.0.2 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

How to detect the OS from a Bash script?

I think the following should work. I'm not sure about win32 though.

if [[ "$OSTYPE" == "linux-gnu"* ]]; then
        # ...
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "darwin"* ]]; then
        # Mac OSX
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "cygwin" ]]; then
        # POSIX compatibility layer and Linux environment emulation for Windows
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "msys" ]]; then
        # Lightweight shell and GNU utilities compiled for Windows (part of MinGW)
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "win32" ]]; then
        # I'm not sure this can happen.
elif [[ "$OSTYPE" == "freebsd"* ]]; then
        # ...
else
        # Unknown.
fi

How to check if running in Cygwin, Mac or Linux?

Usually, uname with its various options will tell you what environment you're running in:

pax> uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 IBM-L3F3936 1.5.25(0.156/4/2) 2008-06-12 19:34 i686 Cygwin

pax> uname -s
CYGWIN_NT-5.1

And, according to the very helpful schot (in the comments), uname -s gives Darwin for OSX and Linux for Linux, while my Cygwin gives CYGWIN_NT-5.1. But you may have to experiment with all sorts of different versions.

So the bash code to do such a check would be along the lines of:

unameOut="$(uname -s)"
case "${unameOut}" in
    Linux*)     machine=Linux;;
    Darwin*)    machine=Mac;;
    CYGWIN*)    machine=Cygwin;;
    MINGW*)     machine=MinGw;;
    *)          machine="UNKNOWN:${unameOut}"
esac
echo ${machine}

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Note that I'm assuming here that you're actually running within CygWin (the bash shell of it) so paths should already be correctly set up. As one commenter notes, you can run the bash program, passing the script, from cmd itself and this may result in the paths not being set up as needed.

If you are doing that, it's your responsibility to ensure the correct executables (i.e., the CygWin ones) are being called, possibly by modifying the path beforehand or fully specifying the executable locations (e.g., /c/cygwin/bin/uname).

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