Linux su command not working, does nothing but show $ prompt

So you found the magic sauce did ya?  So you created a user with useradd or adduser and you try to switch over to that user in a terminal, probably logged in through ssh as root right.

You are trying to use the su – username command but all you get is a $. And not the good kind. The kind that no matter what you type all you get is another line with $ on it. This is a feature by the way so you can’t see files that don’t belong to the user…

Right now you are probably like

As far as I can tell, if you are using Debian or Ubuntu, useradd/adduser defaults the users shell to /bin/sh but the skeleton files located in /etc/skel are all configured for bash.  I have no idea how the system gets the defaults, but it does no good to have your users default shell not pointing to bash.

How to fix this?

To fix it you need to change the users default shell to bash. Bash is usually located in /bin/bash or /usr/bin/bash For me it was /bin/bash. To change it you use usermod command like so

usermod -s /bin/bash username

That will change the shell your user gets when you type su – username. Now since Ubuntu/Debian and maybe other distros contain the configuration in the users .bashrc and .profile files everything will work as expected. When you switch to the user with the above command you are taken to their home directory.

Found more details!

Ok I found more info while digging into the so called useradd docs.

-s, –shell SHELLThe name of the user’s login shell. The default is to leave this field blank, which causes the system to select the default login shell specified by the SHELL variable in /etc/default/useradd, or an empty string by default.

So that is where Linux gets the default value for the user shell and apparently you can use the -s option when creating the user to specify the bash as the shell.

Digging deeper into the mystery sauce I find in my Mastering Ubuntu Server book ( awesome book ) the reason why. It states if you use adduser then their default shell is /bin/bash and if you use useradd (which I used) it defaults to /bin/sh

Links

how to change the default shell of an user in linux? – more info about usermod and changing the users default shell and how to figure out what shells you have installed and their locations.