I like bash, mostly for its interactive features over FreeBSD’s standard Bourne-compatible shell, ash.

Setting bash as the default shell for the root user however has a big downside: if you ever break bash or any of the libraries it depends on, you can’t log in as root anymore to fix it. I’ve tried quite a few ways to work around this, and I think I’ve finally figured out a good solution: leave the root shell as /bin/sh, and add this snippet at the end of /root/.profile:

[ -z "$BASH" ] && /usr/local/bin/bash -c 'true' && exec /usr/local/bin/bash

This will start bash, but only if the shell sourcing .profile isn’t bash, and bash can actually successfully be executed.

In FreeBSD 9, ash has apparently grown command name completion. Together with the editing functions (already available in FreeBSD 7), this might allow me to switch to ash as the default shell.