sindresorhus / default-shell

Get the user's default shell

default-shell

Get the user's default shell

Install

npm install default-shell

Usage

import defaultShell from 'default-shell';

// macOS
console.log(defaultShell);
//=> '/bin/zsh'

// Windows
console.log(defaultShell);
//=> 'C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\cmd.exe'

There is also a method that gets the correct default shell even if it changes at runtime:

import {detectDefaultShell} from 'default-shell';

console.log(detectDefaultShell());
//=> '/bin/zsh'

default-shell's Issues

Use `os.userInfo().shell`

Sometime in the future when we can target Node.js 6.

nodejs/node#6104

I have a polyfill, but not worth the overhead.

TypeScript support

Having a TypeScript type definition file would be nice. Without it I have to write my own type definition file or use // @ts-ignore above the import.

Only one short file is needed:

// index.d.ts
declare module 'default-shell' {
  declare const defaultShell: string // probably could also be "let" instead of "const"
  export default defaultShell
}

Don't trust process.env.SHELL

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.

CommonJS module system support

Hi, I know that ECMAScript Modules are the future, but for now I have a problem using ESM packages in my Electron.js project. I think that having a "hybrid" package is better!

If my understanding is correct, we can extract the code from index.js to a new file index.cjs with a CJS style module.exports = and in index.js leave only a ESM style wrapper: import defaultShell from './index.cjs' and export default defaultShell.

Export detect function

We're using this module in hyper: https://github.com/zeit/hyper/blob/canary/app/session.js#L4

Since we require this module at startup, we won't see changes to the default shell, requiring a restart to use the new default shell after changing it.

I have some ideas on how to fix this, but the best might be to export the detect function too,

const detect = () => {
	const env = process.env;

	if (process.platform === 'darwin') {
		return env.SHELL || '/bin/bash';
	}

	if (process.platform === 'win32') {
		return env.COMSPEC || 'cmd.exe';
	}

	return env.SHELL || '/bin/sh';
})
module.exports = detect();
module.exports.detect = detect

another way would be to purge the require cache in hyper, but that feels hacky.

another way is to just copy this module code into hyper/lib.

Thoughts?