Change Shell to Latest Bash on macOS
Starting with macOS Catalina, Apple switched the default shell from Bash to Zsh. Also, the built-in version of Bash is horribly outdated. No bueno.
Installing the latest version of Bash
You may be surprised to learn that even the latest versions of macOS ship with Bash 3.2, which dates from 2007:
/bin/bash --version
# GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (arm64-apple-darwin22)
# Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This probably has to do with the licensing change that happened with Bash 4.0, which switched to GPLv3. Anyways, you can install the latest version of Bash via Homebrew:
brew install bash
/opt/homebrew/bin/bash --version
# GNU bash, version 5.2.15(1)-release (aarch64-apple-darwin22.1.0)
# Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
That’s more like it.
Changing the default shell to Bash
Now you just need to allowlist Homebrew’s Bash, and set it as default:
sudo sh -c 'echo /opt/homebrew/bin/bash >> /etc/shells'
chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/bash
If you open a new terminal window, you should see your changes take effect:
echo $BASH_VERSION
# 5.2.15(1)-release
If you also want to change the default shell for the root user, run the following:
sudo chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash
Now if you use sudo su
you’ll also see the latest Bash.
Updating scripts
If you have scripts with a shebang line that references /bin/bash
, they’ll still use the outdated version:
#!/bin/bash
echo $BASH_VERSION
You’ll probably want to update them to say this instead:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo $BASH_VERSION
Alrighty, you should be running the latest Bash everywhere now!