Bash And Bash Scripts; What Is "The Shell - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - ADMINISTRATION Administration Manual

Bash and Bash Scripts

These days many people use computers with a graphical user interface (GUI) like KDE
or GNOME. Although they offer lots of features, their use is limited when it comes to
the execution of automatical tasks. Shells are a good addition to GUIs and this chapter
gives you an overview of some aspects of shells, in this case Bash.

5.1 What is "The Shell"?

Traditionally, the shell is Bash (Bourne again Shell). When this chapter speaks about
"the shell" it means Bash. There are actually more available shells than Bash, each
employing different features and characteristics. If you need further information about
other shells, search for shell in YaST.
5.1.1 Knowing The Bash Configuration Files
A shell can be invoked:
1. as an interactive login shell. This is used when logging in to a machine, invoking
Bash with the --login option or when logging in to a remote machine with SSH.
2. as an "ordinary" interactive shell. This is normally the case when starting xterm,
konsole or similar tools.
3. as an non-interactive shell. This is used when invoking a shell script at the com-
mandline.
Bash and Bash Scripts
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