[SOLVED] How to get shell to self-detect using zsh or bash

Issue

I've a question on how to tell which shell the user is using. Suppose a script that if the user is using zsh, then put PATH to his .zshrc and if using bash should put in .bashrc. And set rvmrc accordingly.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
export PATH='/usr/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

I've tried the following but it does not work : (

if [[ $0 == "bash" ]]; then
  export PATH='/usr/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
elif [[ $0 == "zsh" ]]; then
  export PATH='/usr/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc
fi

# ... more commands ...

if [[ $0 == "bash" ]]; then
  [[ -s '/Users/`whoami`/.rvm/scripts/rvm' ]] && source '/Users/`whoami`/.rvm/scripts/rvm' >> ~/.bashrc
  source ~/.bashrc
elif [[ $0 == "zsh" ]]; then
  [[ -s '/Users/`whoami`/.rvm/scripts/rvm' ]] && source '/Users/`whoami`/.rvm/scripts/rvm' >> ~/.zshrc
  source ~/.zshrc
fi

Solution

A word of warning: the question you seem to have asked, the question you meant to ask, and the question you should have asked are three different things.

“Which shell the user is using” is ambiguous. Your attempt looks like you're trying to determine which shell is executing your script. That's always going to be whatever you put in the #! line of the script, unless you meant your users to edit that script, so this isn't useful to you.

What you meant to ask, I think, is what the user's favorite shell is. This can't be determined fully reliably, but you can cover most cases. Check the SHELL environment variable. If it contains fish, zsh, bash, ksh or tcsh, the user's favorite shell is probably that shell. However, this is the wrong question for your problem.

Files like .bashrc, .zshrc, .cshrc and so on are shell initialization files. They are not the right place to define environment variables. An environment variable defined there would only be available in a terminal where the user launched that shell and not in programs started from a GUI. The definition would also override any customization the user may have done in a subsession.

The right place to define an environment variable is in a session startup file. This is mostly unrelated to the user's choice of shell. Unfortunately, there's no single place to define environment variables. On a lot of systems, ~/.profile will work, but this is not universal. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4621/correctly-setting-environment and the other posts I link to there for a longer discussion.

Answered By - Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

Answer Checked By - Dawn Plyler (WPSolving Volunteer)