FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Introducing the Shell

The UNIX shell is the command-line interface between the user and the operating system kernel, which is the process-executing core of the operating system. If you have worked with MS-DOS, you can think of the shell as being similar to the DOS prompt, where you type commands to work with your files and the data in them. In a looser sense, you could also think of the Windows or Macintosh desktops as being shells, because even though they’re a lot more flashy and specialized than the command-line interfaces they replaced, they fulfill the same purpose to you as a user: they interpret your commands and communicate them to the operating system’s kernel. The shell acts as a translator, rendering human language into machine language ...