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Review: Command line shells
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
One of our readers recently asked if I'd talk about command line shells, describing and comparing them. Since shells are a cornerstone of the Linux experience, I agree it's an important topic and am happy to explore it.
A shell is a program which translates commands from the computer user into instructions the underlying operating system can understand. It then usually returns some sort of output. Typically when we talk about shells we are talking about command line shells, where the user types instructions into a terminal and gets back a text response. However, there are other types of shells. A desktop environment provides a graphical shell where our mouse clicks and keyboard input provide the instructions for the shell to parse. A shell could also accept input in the form of touch (the way mobile devices do) or speech (the way smart speakers work).