Don't trust process.env.SHELL

[silverwind]

As seen in sindresorhus/shell-path#10 (comment), process.env.SHELL can't be trusted to work in certain situations, leading to hard to debug errors.

I think we should first stat and check for the executable bit, and possibly fallback to well-known shell paths like /bin/bash or /bin/zsh on error.

[sindresorhus]

Don't trust process.env.SHELL

👎 I don't think we should distrust it just because one user has a misconfigured system. With that logic nothing can be trusted. I would be open to it if it were a common problem, but that's not the case.

[silverwind]

I tend to agree, but I think it's at least worth investigating if there are more reliable ways find the user's shell, a environment variable just seems too brittle. On Linux, I'd probably put more trust into the passwd entry.

[sindresorhus]

Alright. I did research doing more extensive checks initially, including using passwd, but didn't want to complicate as I discovered the current solution would work in 99% of cases.

[silverwind]

Okay let's leave it simple. Doing passwd parsing cross-platform would be too messy.

[sindresorhus]

Doing passwd parsing cross-platform would be too messy.

Not even possible. OS X no longer uses passwd. https://github.com/sindresorhus/passwd-user/blob/09cc55af4d8d0a94885ce318cd3993d44ef7aa44/index.js#L81-L83

[rickgregory]

Since I started this little issue in the linked (now closed) bug... let me know if you need me to test out anything. While I've done a clean install on my Mac, I have a cloned, bootable drive of the disk as it was when it showed the problem.

[silverwind]

@rickgregory one think I'm still wondering about is how your regular shell was still working. I wouldn't totally exlude the possibilty of a bug in electron.

Maybe the output of these from your terminal may help us track this further:

/bin/zsh --version
which zsh
echo $SHELL
/usr/bin/id -P $(whoami)

[rickgregory]

My standard shell is bash, not zsh. I'll boot from the external clone
tonight and try out the commands above. For now, here's what a clean 10.11.3 install gives:

$ /bin/zsh --version
zsh 5.0.8 (x86_64-apple-darwin15.0)
$ which zsh
/bin/zsh
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
$ /usr/bin/id -P $(whoami)
rickg:********:501:20::0:0:richard gregory:/Users/rickg:/bin/bash

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:45 PM, silverwind notifications@github.com
wrote:

@rickgregory https://github.com/rickgregory one think I'm still
wondering about is how your regular shell was still working. I wouldn't
totally exlude the possibilty of a bug in electron.

Maybe the output of these from your terminal may help us track this
further:

/bin/zsh --version
which zsh
echo $SHELL
/usr/bin/id -P $(whoami)

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