login-shell 1 user commands nosh login-shell invoke a shell as a login shell login-shell login-shell takes the value of the SHELL environment variable, defaulting to the operating system's default shell name if it is not present or blank, and chain-loads to it. It prepends a minus sign to the 0th argument that it passes to the shell, the Unix convention for telling a shell that it is a login shell. The SHELL environment variable can be set up with the userenv-fromenv1 utility, amongst others. This is effectively identical to using exec1 with its -a command-line option: $ command exec -a -"${SHELL}" "${SHELL}" Because login-shell is a built-in command, it saves a round-trip executing an entire external sh1 utility in service bundle run scripts, simply to do some trivial argument processing. Paul Jarc created a loginshell utility for idtools in 2001. It also permitted passing arguments to the shell, which of course usually tells a shell that it is non-interactive, which is inappropriate for login-shell's limited and specific purpose of starting a login shell. Jonathan de Boyne Pollard