Chapter 9
What is a shell? Why and when are command-line interfaces advantageous compared to graphical interfaces?
A shell is a user interface that you use to interact with the operating system of a computer. Usually, people use this term to refer to a command-line shell that allows you to control the OS with a set of textual commands. There are three main advantages of command-line interfaces over GUIs. First, textual commands can be combined and stored and thus form scripts. Second, they require a minimal amount of memory and thus are way more suitable for interacting with remote machines via the internet. Third, command-line interfaces are quite unified across different operating systems—commands on Linux and macOS are identical, and even ...
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