Category: System Administration

This is the procedure for configuring localization (locale) for English language and Danish regional setting in FreeBSD. Tested on FreeBSD 14.2 with XFCE 4.20 on 2025-03-31.

Introduction.

I have tested the official FreeBSD handbook procedure. I have tested countless guides and advice from forums, discussions and website. They have all failed to meet my basic requirements: English language and Danish regional setting in system console, window manager and applications. See my test below. I wanted Danish ISO 8601 standard format for date, time and numbers. This is also known as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. I did not want to see US imperial format for date, time and numbers. I suddently had an idea of hacking an existing English locale and simply linking to a Danish for regional setting. It turned out to work perfect.

What is a locale setting?

A locale setting is made up of the language, the regional setting and the character encoding standard. As an example, en_DK.UTF-8 locale would be for user, who prefer English language in a Danish regional setting with the UTF-8 character encoding standard.

Locale specific information can be proveded with the locale utility. It is important to know, that the utility respect the PATH_LOCALE environment variable. If this is set, then this is used instead of the default locale directory.

# locale -a | grep DK
da_DK.ISO8859-1
da_DK.ISO8859-15
da_DK.UTF-8

Create a new locale.

Create a new locale definition, that is based on English. This new locale definition will be English language with Danish regional setting and UTF-8 character encoding standard.

# cd /usr/share/locale/
# mkdir -p en_DK.UTF-8
# cp -r en_GB.UTF-8/* en_DK.UTF-8/

Link to Danish regional setting.

For time format, numeric format and monetary format, create symbolic links to the Danish locale definition.

# cd en_DK.UTF-8/
# ls
LC_COLLATE	LC_CTYPE	LC_MESSAGES	LC_MONETARY	LC_NUMERIC	LC_TIME
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME .
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC .
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY .

# locale -a | grep DK
da_DK.ISO8859-1
da_DK.ISO8859-15
da_DK.UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8

# nano /etc/login.conf
default:\
        :passwd_format=sha512:\
        :copyright=/etc/COPYRIGHT:\
        :welcome=/var/run/motd:\
        :setenv=BLOCKSIZE=K:\
        :mail=/var/mail/$:\
        :path=/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/bin ~/bin:\
        :nologin=/var/run/nologin:\
        :cputime=unlimited:\
        :datasize=unlimited:\
        :stacksize=unlimited:\
        :memorylocked=64K:\
        :memoryuse=unlimited:\
        :filesize=unlimited:\
        :coredumpsize=unlimited:\
        :openfiles=unlimited:\
        :maxproc=unlimited:\
        :sbsize=unlimited:\
        :vmemoryuse=unlimited:\
        :swapuse=unlimited:\
        :pseudoterminals=unlimited:\
        :kqueues=unlimited:\
        :umtxp=unlimited:\
        :pipebuf=unlimited:\
        :priority=0:\
        :ignoretime@:\
        :umask=022:\
        :charset=UTF-8:\
        :lang=en_DK.UTF-8:

# cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

Backup and restore the new locale.

Create a backup of the new locale. This ensures, that it can be restored, if it should get deleted. It can also be used to install on another host.

# tar -cvpzf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz -C /usr/share/locale en_DK.UTF-8
a en_DK.UTF-8
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_COLLATE
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES

The content can be confirmed.

# tar -tvf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz

The locale setting can be restored.

# tar -xvpzf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz -C /usr/share/locale
x en_DK.UTF-8/
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_COLLATE
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES

Issue: Port misc/locale-en_DK not working.

I tested the official port and package misc/locale-en_DK. This failed Danish special characters input in FreeBSD system console. I even spent extra time testing custom environment variables.

# pkg install locale-en_DK
Message from locale-en_DK-0.1.1:
In order to set the en_DK.UTF-8 locale for the login shell of an single
user add the following configuration to ~/.login_conf:
me:\
        :charset=UTF-8:\
        :lang=en_DK.UTF-8:\
        :setenv=PATH_LOCALE=/usr/local/share/locale:
More information about the process of configuring login class methods in
available in the handbook.
More information about the PATH_LOCALE environment variable is available in the
locale(1) manual page.

References.

• Chapter 25. Localization
• Date / Time / Currency / Other Stuff – Format
• Setting Locale – Accented Characters in Console
• LOCALE in FreeBSD Manual Pages

Blank screen and muted audio in XFCE.

The first issue, I noticed, when switching from GNOME to XFCE, was, how the HDMI output was cut-off after a few minutes in which there has been no user input, such as attending a video conference. Pressing a key would turn-on the screen, but the audio would never return again. The audio could not even be re-enabled with Pulse Audio controls.

Disabling power management from XFCE interface.

Using the settings dialog, I disabled any kind of power management. This includes any screen blank and suspend option. Despite of this, the video and audio is getting cut-off. I could not find any kind of screensaver, that should be causing this.

# ps aux | grep power
/usr/local/libexec/upowerd
xfce4-power-manager
# ps aux | grep saver
# ps aux | grep screen

Removing power manager from XFCE?

I assume, that this is related to power management, because a screen saver would probably not be so aggressive. Knowing, that I will not need power management, a simple approuch would be to remove it from the installation. However, XFCE went for a forced depedency on this one. What a piece of shit programming from XFCE. Power management should be optional – and not a plague!

Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Deinstallation has been requested for the following 2 packages (of 0 packages in the universe):
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
xfce: 4.20
xfce4-power-manager: 4.20.0
Number of packages to be removed: 2
The operation will free 2 MiB.
Proceed with deinstalling packages? [y/N]: N

How does power managment in XFCE work?

A search for occurances indicates, that it could be started automatically as an unwanted service. It could even be started, if it was running in an earlier user session.

# find / -type f -name '*xfce4-power*'
/home/lightman/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-power-manager.xml
/usr/local/share/metainfo/xfce4-power-manager.appdata.xml
/usr/local/share/man/man1/xfce4-power-manager-settings.1.gz
/usr/local/share/man/man1/xfce4-power-manager.1.gz
/usr/local/share/applications/xfce4-power-manager-settings.desktop
/usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart/xfce4-power-manager.desktop
/usr/local/bin/xfce4-power-manager-settings
/usr/local/bin/xfce4-power-manager

Stopping power manager in XFCE.

To my surprice, XFCE did actually write a built-in help, which kindly lists a quit option. It also seemed to actually quit the unwanted service. However, this is probably just a shortlived pleasure. It might restart. Especially after a new session or a reboot.

$ xfce4-power-manager --help
Usage:
  xfce4-power-manager [OPTION?]
Help Options:
  -h, --help                      Show help options
  --help-all                      Show all help options
  --help-sm-client                Show session management options
Application Options:
  --daemon                        Daemonize
  --debug                         Enable debugging
  --dump                          Dump all information
  --restart                       Restart the running instance of Xfce power manager
  -c, --customize                 Show the configuration dialog
  -q, --quit                      Quit any running xfce power manager
  -V, --version                   Version information
$ xfce4-power-manager -q

Killing the XFCE power manager from cron as a work-around.

As it remains unclear, how the unwanted service is started, a work-around is to repeat killing it from cron, until I learn, how this service can be permanently disabled. This cron job kills it every minute, if running. I have tested this be working.

# pkg info -r xfce4-power-manager
xfce4-power-manager-4.20.0:
        xfce-4.20
# pkg info -r upower
upower-1.90.7:
        xfce4-settings-4.20.1
        xfce4-power-manager-4.20.0
        gnome-power-manager-3.32.0_3
        gnome-control-center-43.2_4
        mutter-42.4_3
        gnome-settings-daemon-42.2_8
# nano /etc/crontab
*  *  *  *  *  root  pkill xfce4-power-manager
*  *  *  *  *  root  pkill upowerd
# service cron restart

Tips appreciated!

I appreciate any tips about this issue.

Configuring PulseAudio on FreeBSD.

In this example, the PulseAudio is configured to output to HDMI by default. If USB headphones are attached, then audio output is automatically switched to these. I tested this to be working.

$ pactl list sinks
Sink #3
State: RUNNING
Name: oss_output.dsp3
Description: 3 - Intel (0x2818) (HDMI/DP 8ch)
Mute: no
# nano /usr/local/etc/pulse/default.pa
set-default-sink oss_output.dsp3
load-module module-switch-on-connect

Switching audio output with pactl on FreeBSD.

pactl is a control interface for a running PulseAudio sound server. In this example, the audio output is switched to a pair of USB headphones. The listings indicate, that the headphones are associated with sink 4 and name oss_output.dsp5. The output is switched to to this and it is un-muted. Warning: The volume is optionally set to 100%. The volume setting is the same as the one, that is set on the headphones themselves.

$ pactl list sinks
Sink #4
State: RUNNING
Name: oss_output.dsp5
Description: 5 - Corsair CORSAIR HS80 RGB Wireless Gaming Receiver
muted: yes
Sample Specification: s16le 2ch 44100Hz
$ pactl list sinks short
4 oss_output.dsp5 module-oss.c s16le 2ch 44100Hz RUNNING
$ pactl set-default-sink oss_output.dsp5
$ pactl set-sink-mute oss_output.dsp5 0
$ pactl set-sink-volume oss_output.dsp5 100%

References.

• Chapter 9. Multimedia in the FreeBSD handbook.
• PulseAudio on Freshports.

I noticed, that my Poudriere build machine failed to compile net-im/signal-desktop for FreeBSD 14 with latest ports branch, because it require devel/esbuild 0.25.0, while build environment has 0.24.0. Tested 2025-03-07 and 2025-03-10.

✘ [ERROR] Cannot start service: Host version "0.24.0" does not match binary version "0.25.0"
1 error
Error: The service was stopped: write EPIPE
    at /wrkdirs/usr/ports/net-im/signal-desktop/work/Signal-Desktop-7.44.0/node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:968:34
    at responseCallbacks.<computed> (/wrkdirs/usr/ports/net-im/signal-desktop/work/Signal-Desktop-7.44.0/node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:622:9)
    at afterClose (/wrkdirs/usr/ports/net-im/signal-desktop/work/Signal-Desktop-7.44.0/node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:613:28)
    at /wrkdirs/usr/ports/net-im/signal-desktop/work/Signal-Desktop-7.44.0/node_modules/esbuild/lib/main.js:1988:18
    at onwriteError (node:internal/streams/writable:605:3)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:84:21)
ERROR: "build:esbuild" exited with 1.
*** Error code 1
Stop.
make: stopped in /usr/ports/net-im/signal-desktop
=>> Cleaning up wrkdir
===>  Cleaning for signal-desktop-7.44.0_1
build of net-im/signal-desktop | signal-desktop-7.44.0_1 ended at Mon Mar 10 05:13:34 CET 2025
build time: 00:00:47
!!! build failure encountered !!!

I notified the FreeBSD maintainer. He kindly replied, that he has notified devel/esbuild and the issue will be fixed.

Earlier this year, I noticed, that a similar issue happened. The required version was 0.21, while build environment had 0.24. I notified the maintainer. It was fixed.

Prevent Signal from being removed during update.

# pkg lock signal-desktop
signal-desktop-7.42.0: lock this package? [y/N]:

It can later be unlocked.

# pkg unlock signal-desktop

Work-around for “Shared object “libFLAC.so.12″ not found”.

The update, while Signal being locked, resulted in a problem with a link to a FLAC library.

$ signal-desktop &
$ ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libFLAC.so.12" not found, required by "signal-desktop"

I fixed this with a temporary link to the correct FLAC library. This should automatically be fixed, when Signal is fixed upstream.

# pkg info -l flac | grep libFLAC
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC++.a
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC++.so
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC++.so.11
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC++.so.11.0.0
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC.a
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.14
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.14.0.0
/usr/local/share/aclocal/libFLAC++.m4
/usr/local/share/aclocal/libFLAC.m4
# pkg which /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.12
/usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.12 was not found in the database
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.14 /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.12
# ldconfig -R
$ signal-desktop &

# rm /usr/local/lib/libFLAC.so.12
# ldconfig -R

Fixed.

The port compiled again 2025-03-21 and the package could be unlocked and the symbolic link removed.

References.

• net-im/signal-desktop on Freshports.
• devel/esbuild on Freshports.
• Bug 285291 – devel/esbuild: latest version break net-im/signal-desktop.
• c21980b417ebf0103cb183d416c1f80526866d46.

My Poudriere build machine suddently stopped at the following error, that seems to be caused by a problem with CMake or run-time dependency, which should be built automatically.

build started at Fri Mar  7 16:46:57 CET 2025
port directory: /usr/ports/graphics/evince
package name: evince-46.3.1
...
Poudriere version: poudriere-git-3.4.2
Host OSVERSION: 1402000
Jail OSVERSION: 1402000
...
Did not find CMake 'cmake'
Found CMake: NO
Run-time dependency gnome-desktop-3.0 found: NO (tried pkgconfig)
meson.build:237:20: ERROR: Dependency "gnome-desktop-3.0" not found, tried pkgconfig

Any tips for solutions are greatly appreciated.

References.

• Bugzilla 274017.

Tracker3 core dumps on FreeBSD with GNOME.

If you have a FreeBSD desktop computer with the GNOME desktop environment, or similar open source desktop computer, you might have noticed random Tracker3 core dumps on the file system.

$ find . -name '*.core'
./bin/tracker3.core
./projects/tracker3.core

You might also have noticed messages about Tracker3 error, exit and core dumps in system logs.

$ dmesg
pid 2416 (tracker3), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 10 (no core dump - other error)
pid 2451 (tracker3), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 10 (no core dump - other error)
pid 2848 (tracker3), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 10 (core dumped)

What is Tracker3?

A first approach to learning, what Tracker3 is, would be to open its manual page. Unfortunately, as often seen with utilities like this, they do not include a manual by default.

$ man tracker3
No manual entry for "tracker3"

A search for “tracker3 official website” on search engines does not give a clean answer. The utility seems to not have a website nor a coding home listed on search engines. Again, a sign of poor coding and project management skills.

Thanks to Freshports, more about the utility can be learned. Here, it is described as a system utility, that index and harvest meta data for GNOME utilities, such as the file management utility Nautilus. A rather useless feature, in my oppinion. Its undocumented operation is a privacy concern. It might even scan files across datasets and partitions, which could be privacy concern.

Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata
database, search tool and indexer.

Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when
compared with some other competing frameworks and is by far the fastest and most
memory efficient Nautilus search and Deskbar backends currently availble.

It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost
infinte number of properties, metadata (both embedded/harvested as well as user
definable), a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other
entities.

Freshports does have a reference to a page, which seems to be about Tracker3 by GNOME, but aligned with their poor views on privacy and security, the site either does not work or blocks privacy VPNs.

<Code>AccessDenied</Code>

It does not come with a manual by default. However, according to FreeBSD Manual Pages, there are no known manual for it. I even tried compiling it with option for installing its manual pages. It was not installed.

===> The following configuration options are available for tracker3-3.5.3_3:
DOCS=on: Build and/or install documentation
MAN=off: Install manual pages

It is a dependency of Nautilus, which does not have an option for disabling this.

Removing Tracker3 from GNOME and FreeBSD.

If a system utility, that index and harvest the file system for filenames and metadata in the background, is not needed or unwanted, it might be a logic approach, that Tracker3 is removed with the package manager. However, as seen in the output, it does not seem, that GNOME wanted that to be an option.

# pkg remove tracker3
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
Deinstallation has been requested for the following 7 packages (of 0 packages in the universe):
Installed packages to be REMOVED:
evince: 43.1_11
gnome-lite: 42_5
gnome-terminal: 3.44.2_3
gnome-tweaks: 40.10_4
nautilus: 42.2_3
sushi: 42.0_5
tracker3: 3.5.3_3
Number of packages to be removed: 7
The operation will free 38 MiB.
Proceed with deinstalling packages? [y/N]: 

Tracker3 in GNOME is a privacy concern.

Tracker3 is deeply embedded in GNOME. Tracker3 comes enabled without consent from the user. It is a forced installation, that comes with no clear information, warning nor documentation. It is difficult or impossible to disable or deinstall. It scans file systems, datasets and partitions. It stores metadata from files, that has been downloaded temporary. It stores metadata for files, that has been deleted. It stores metadata in internal database and hidden files. It does not have an interface to manage data. This is not a utility, that fits well with the UNIX philosophy. Tracker3 is a privacy concern.

Disabling Search and Tracker3 in GNOME.

Tracker3 can to some degree be disabled from within GNOME by going to the Settings menu and Search and then disabling Application Search. This also seems to reduce the amount of core dumps. However, I have been able to find any documentation about this.

Switching from GNOME to XFCE.

Switching desktop environment from GNOME to XFCE, or similar more simple, resource friendly and privacy focused desktop environment, could be a better over-all solution. The switch to XFCE should be fairly straight forward, because it is also based on X. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee, that XFCE will not implement the same or similar kind of file system metadata scanner at some point. A reason is, that some users and project contributors believe, that a desktop search feature is more important than privacy and security.

References.

• Tracker3 on Freshports.
• TSPARQL.
• TinySPARQL on GNOME.
• Desktop Search on Wikipedia.
• XFCE desktop environment.

Some text files has line breaks, that might look good on fixed width screens, but can not be used as paragraph in other editing software. The is cause by line breaks.

$ cat input.txt 
The computer was a powerful WOPR machine for game simulation.
You can play a nice game of chess or an exciting war game.

This one-liner will replace line breaks with space and then remove any double spaces. It will also make sure, that the file ends with a new line, so it meets the POSIX standard definition of a text file.

$ (tr '\n' ' ' < input.txt | sed 's/  */ /g'; echo) > output.txt

The result is one clean paragraph, that will scale to any screen width or be used in other editing software.

$ cat output.txt 
The computer was a powerful WOPR machine for game simulation. You can play a nice game of chess or an exciting war game.

Is it possible to reduce or disable swap memory on FreeBSD? In this example, 32 GB swap is enabled by using 16 GB on each of 2 SSDs. I would prefer this to be closer to 8 GB by using 4 GB on each of 2 SSDs.

Information about current swap devices.

Get information about currently active swap devices and sizes.

# swapinfo -h
Device              Size     Used    Avail Capacity
/dev/nda0p3          16G       0B      16G     0%
/dev/nda1p3          16G       0B      16G     0%
Total                32G       0B      32G     0%

Get information about partitions on disks and GEOM providers. Each device and partition has a unique identifier, that can be used to make changes.

# gpart show
=>        40  4000797280  nda0  GPT  (1.9T)
          40      532480     1  efi  (260M)
      532520        1024     2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
      533544         984        - free -  (492K)
      534528    33554432     3  freebsd-swap  (16G)
    34088960  3966707712     4  freebsd-zfs  (1.8T)
  4000796672         648        - free -  (324K)
=>        40  3907029088  nda1  GPT  (1.8T)
          40      532480     1  efi  (260M)
      532520        1024     2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
      533544         984        - free -  (492K)
      534528    33554432     3  freebsd-swap  (16G)
    34088960  3872940032     4  freebsd-zfs  (1.8T)
  3907028992         136        - free -  (68K)

The devices can be listed. This also shows the naming convention for the partitions.

# gpart status
nda0p1      OK  nda0
nda0p2      OK  nda0
nda0p3      OK  nda0
nda0p4      OK  nda0
nda1p1      OK  nda1
nda1p2      OK  nda1
nda1p3      OK  nda1
nda1p4      OK  nda1

Disabling swap on FreeBSD.

Move swapped pages out from swap devices and disable them.

# swapoff -a
swapoff: removing /dev/nda0p3 as swap device
swapoff: removing /dev/nda1p3 as swap device

If you want to re-enable swap, it is as easy as reverting that.

# swapon -a
swapon: adding /dev/nda0p3 as swap device
swapon: adding /dev/nda1p3 as swap device

Reducing swap partitions?

Is it possible to reduce the swap partition on each SSD and then have ZFS use the free space? Is it possible to split the partitions?

Deleting swap partitions?

Delete or comment out the swap partitions from the static information about file systems. This ensures, that they do not get re-mounted during boot.

# nano /etc/fstab
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/gpt/efiboot0       /boot/efi       msdosfs rw              2       2
#/dev/nda0p3            none            swap    sw              0       0
#/dev/nda1p3            none            swap    sw              0       0
proc                    /proc           procfs  rw              0       0

Is it possible to delete the swap partition on each SSD and then have ZFS use the free space? The handbook does mention growing partitions, but it is not clear, if ZFS can in fact grow directly or it will be necessary to re-create partitions, format, import and encrypt.

Links

• Add swap
• 20.3. Resizing and Growing Disks in FreeBSD Handbook.

What is a Bourne shell?

The Bourne shell, also often referred to as /bin/sh or just sh, has been a default shell for users on FreeBSD for many major versions, while C shell was the default shell for root. From FreeBSD 14, the default shell for root is the Bourne shell.

Changing to Bourne shell on FreeBSD.

The shell for a user in FreeBSD can be changed with the chsh utility.

Configuring the Bourne shell in FreeBSD.

The Bourne shell in FreeBSD is configured by editing the global configuration file /etc/profile and/or the local user configuration file .shrc. These files contains commands, that will be executed, when the shell is started, such as when the user logs into the system.

In this example, the global configuration sets the blocksize for default file operations, ccache settings, the default editor, he default pager and a prompt. The prompt shows a “$” for a normal user and a “#” for root.

# nano /etc/profile
BLOCKSIZE=K
CCACHE=1
CCACHE_DIR=/var/cache/ccache
EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/nano
PAGER=less
VISUAL=$EDITOR
if [ "$(id -u)" -eq 0 ]; then
  PS1='# '
else
  PS1='$ '
fi
export BLOCKSIZE CCACHE CCACHE_DIR EDITOR PAGER PS1 VISUAL

If the user would like to add or change custom settings, then this can be set in the local user configuration file. If this is not relavant, the file should be deleted, because it does contain settings, that could interfere with the global settings.

$ rm .shrc
# rm .shrc

Testing.

The Bourne shell can now be tested. In this example, a user log in and switch to root.

$ whoami
jennifer
$ su -
Password: Pencil
# whoami
root
# echo $EDITOR
/usr/local/bin/nano

The different kinds of shells.

There are different kinds of shells, such as login shells and sub-shells. The sub-shells are also known as non-login shells. The difference is, that a login shell reads global configuration files, while sub-shells just inherits the settings from the original shell. In this example, the first shell will be a login-shell, while the second will be a sub-shell.

FreeBSD/amd64 (wopr) (ttyv0)

Login: stephen
Password: Pencil
 __      __________ ____________________ 
/  \    /  \_____  \\______   \______   \
\   \/\/   //   |   \|     ___/|       _/
 \        //    |    \    |    |    |   \
  \__/\  / \_______  /____|    |____|_  /
       \/          \/                 \/ 
Greetings, professor Falken. How about a nice game of chess?
$ sh
$ su stephen
$ logout
$ logout

More about shells.

• The different shells in FreeBSD.
• Configuring C shell on FreeBSD.
• FreeBSD Manual Pages – SH.