[Bug 1494] doesn't look on path for $SHELL

[bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.mindrot.org]

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1494

--- Comment #5 from Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.org>  ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> WONTFIX - I don't accept that logic (you wouldn't specify "zsh" as
> your shell in /etc/passwd without a path).

I wouldn't do it because the environment (in particular, $PATH) at this
time may be unspecified. So, it wouldn't make sense. For SHELL, this is
different: when I set $SHELL, I already have a $PATH value that I
control.

Note that one of the reasons why I don't always have a full pathname is
that I do from my .zshenv:

[[ -o login ]] && SHELL=${0#-}

Then one may wonder why $0 doesn't have an absolute pathname...

> Furthermore, I don't think it is too hard to specify a path when a
> user overrides $SHELL.

Yes, for the use of SSH, probably.

Note that a relative pathname could still be useful in some context,
e.g. when one needs to set SHELL from a config file which accepts only
hardcoded values (e.g. no references to environment variables such as
$HOME) and that would be shared under NFS. However, I don't think this
is a problem as far as SSH is concerned (at least until now).

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