Zsh in Bash

When it comes to *nix shells, I prefer zsh over the standard bash that Ubuntu ships with. However, I don’t always have permissions to change my shell – notably on VMs in Azure.

To overcome this I make bash start zsh as the first thing by making a ~/.bash_profile with the following content:

export SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
exec /usr/bin/zsh -l

Or whatever the path to zsh is. (The path can be found with which zsh.)