Forgot to set bash as terminal before uninstalling fish

Question

Well, as dumb as it sounds, I was having some trouble with Fish, and decided to uninstall it. The wrong way. I simply used apt-get remove fish without using chsh -s /bin/bash beforehand.

So this is now what happens:

• Terminal may open, but will hang with a blinking cursor.
• PS1 will never show.
• Closing Terminal will log out the current user.
• Installing another Terminal emulator does not resolve this as those hang as well.

I'm on the latest version of Freya. How I got to this point is that I discovered that Fish had problems customizing the prompt when using fish_config on debian versions of it, so it was recommended to uninstall the debian version and use a different one in order to fix this issue. So this is where I uninstalled it without remembering to set bash as the default Terminal.

Where can I go from here without completely restoring Elementary OS?

Answer 1

• Launch Ubuntu Software Center
• Reinstall fish
• Launch terminal and change shell to bash: chsh -s /bin/bash
• remove fish

Answer 2

The login shell of a user is defined in /etc/passwd. You should edit the file with root privilege and change your user's shell path to /bin/bash.