> After some digging it seems that "true" shell involved in sqlite3 .shell execution in my case is /bin/dash If you had dug into shell.c, you would have found that the .shell meta-command merely defers to whatever the system() C library call does. That is likely to vary from one system to another for bare shell-like commands, but I dare say it is enough to let you specify that a particular shell be run if you simply name it as the first word in the arguments to .shell.