Getting Back to Bash from Zsh on MacOS

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Bash to Zsh

At Apple’s advice I’ve switched the login shell from Bash to Zsh on all my Macs. For the most part, what worked in Bash works in Zsh, but sometimes I do still want to get back to Bash to test something or to check something. You might imagine that simply typing bash from a Zsh prompt would get you a Bash shell, and you’d be right, sort of. When you just run the command bash you get a bare shell without the customisations that would have been applied when you opened a new Terminal window with Bash as your default shell. This will be immediately obvious because the prompt will be the basic bash-3.2$ as opposed to the hostname, current folder, and you’re username like you were used to.

The solution is really simple — pass the -l flag to signify that you want your new shell treated like a login shell, and hey presto, you’re back to Bash just like you remembered it ðŸ ‚

So, if you switch your Mac to Zsh, you get back to the Bash experience you had before with the following command:

bash -l