The Shell is the command-line interpreter. It is the basic way that you, the user, communicate with the LINUX operating system. You will run commands and the shell will execute them. Our sessions will concentrate on learning the shell and the commands used to communicate with it.

There are a number of different shells in UNIX. The classic Bell Labs shell is called the Bourne shell (sh). Korn shell (ksh) is an enhanced shell, also from Bell Labs. The C shell (csh) was developed at the University of California, Berkley. The LINUX shell is called Bash (bash).

Many of the commands are the same between the different shells, although you might encounter slight differences. The best way to tell if there is a difference from what a book or online resource shows is to try it!

Type


to see what your login shell is. It should be bash in the Linux system.

You should also learn the man command. It will show you a page of help about a particular command. To run it, type man followed by the command you are interested in. For instance:


will show you the on-line manual page for the man command.