Chapter 1. What Is the Shell?
When we speak of the command line, we are really referring to the
shell. The shell is a program that takes
keyboard commands and passes them to the operating system to carry
out. Almost all Linux distributions supply a shell program from the
GNU Project called bash
. The name
bash is an acronym for Bourne
Again Shell, a reference to the fact that
bash
is an enhanced
replacement for sh
, the original
Unix shell program written by Steve Bourne.
Terminal Emulators
When using a graphical user interface, we need another program
called a terminal emulator to interact
with the shell. If we look through our desktop menus, we
will probably find one. KDE uses konsole
and GNOME uses gnome-terminal
, though it’s likely called simply ...
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