The Console, Konsole, XTerm, etc When you start the unix console
on the Mac or Linux, that really is just a window which knows
how to display text in a fixed width font. It knows nothing
about commands or anything like that. However, it knows that it
must immediately start another process called a shell, forward
your keystrokes to that program and display any output the shell
sends back. It also knows that once that shell finishes, so
should it (usually anyway). The Shell is the thing that directly
executes your commands. Common examples include tcsh, bash, zsh,
ksh, ash,.... However, there are two main styles: Korn Shells
(bash is the main one) and C Shells (tcsh is the main one).
Windows shells are crap and do very little bar execute commands.
Good unix shells are full programming environments. Shells read
your commands, interpret them and react in the correct way. So,
when you type "ls -la skoleLinux" into the console this is what
- The console gets the keystrokes one at a time and passes them
unchanged to