The term shell can refer to any interface to a computer (in the sense that the shell is the outermost part, the part people interact with.) But more commonly, shell is another way of saying “command line interface” or Terminal.

On Unix systems, there are actually multiple shells — bash, sh, csh, tcsh, and many others. The shell you use determines how you interact with the command line interface, but they’re all similar. The default shell on Mac OS X is bash, or “Bourne Again Shell”. Bash is the one we’ll be using.

To find out what shell you’re using, you can type echo $0 into Terminal and push Enter. It should return “bash”.

There isn’t much practical knowledge to be gained by knowing about the different shells, but I just didn’t want you to be surprised if you heard the terms shell or bash.

Further reading:
Wikipedia: Shell
Wikipedia: bash

Is anything unclear? I’ll explain!

Posted in Definitions, Mac, Unix |