< Previous | Contents | Next >
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 bash is an enhanced replacement for sh, the original Unix shell program written by Steve Bourne.