What Is a Shell?
We've already talked about the basics of the shell and what you can do with it back in Chapter 8, “Working with the Shell.” That chapter introduced the shell as a command-line interface, and discussed the various shells you can use in FreeBSD and what kinds of commands are available in the shell for controlling the system. Now, though, we'll be looking at the shell itself in more detail as it applies to the multitudes of users you might be supporting on your system, and how to customize it to your taste.
We already know that a shell (in brief) is a command-line interface in which you can enter the typed commands that make the UNIX computing experience so markedly different from a fully GUI-based one such as Windows or Mac OS. ...
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