Using chsh to switch to a csh shell from bash,

Question

People keep saying you need to logout and log back in for chsh to take effect but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this. Logout doesn't work; it tells me to use exit. Exit closes the terminal but when I open a new terminal nothing has changed. Do I need to reboot my whole system?

Answer 1

logout works only when you use tty - computer terminal accessible from Ctrl+Alt+F1 through F6. This is probably not what you want.

If you want to log-out from Unity desktop you need to either:

• log-out through GUI (power button in the top right hand side corner or by pressing Alt and typing in Log Out in the Unity HUD)
• or run gnome-session-quit in terminal emulator (like gnome-terminal).

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Yeah, reboot would work too :)

Answer 2

I think you're trying to change the shell being used when you use your terminal emulator (such as urxvt, gnome-terminal, xterm) or when you use the console. My assumption is that you're logged into a graphical environment such as gnome-shell/unity/etc. and exit just closes your terminal emulator window and quite rightly so.

Try logging out of your X session and then back in. exit would have worked if you were logged in using a console (most likely tty1-6, accessible via CTRL+ALT+F1-6). Of course it would have worked but only for that and the following console sessions - it wouldn't influence your already running X session's behaviour.