ypcat passwd
Another way to determine what shell you are currently running is by looking at your SHELL environment variable. Like other environment variables, you can look at the value of SHELL by running the following command:
echo $SHELL
By default on CS machines, your shell will be 'tcsh'. For this
course, we will be using the 'bash' shell so you should change your
default shell to this. To find out how to do this, you can run the
command 'chsh'. The location of the 'bash' program can be found by
running 'which bash'. You can verify that your shell has changed by
re-inspecting the passwd file with the 'ypcat' command above.
Occasionally, characters will appear on the terminal that can cause...curious...screen artifacts. Some of these control characters can make your current session unusable by inserting garbage on the screen, making 'return' not work, etc. If you are running an 'xterm' window, you can reset the session by putting the mouse over the xterm and putting in a CTRL+RIGHT CLICK to bring down a menu. Drag the mouse over 'Do Full Reset' and release. This should reset your terminal session and things should return to normal. If they don't, log out and log back in. If you are logging in remotely, you may have to log out and log back in to return things to normal.