Sams Teach Yourself FreeBSD® in 24 Hours

Summary

In this hour, you learned about basic use of the UNIX shell in FreeBSD. You learned that the shell acts much like an interpreter, translating human commands into language that the kernel can understand and vice versa. You looked at the different shells available for FreeBSD and examined some of the benefits and drawbacks of each. You then learned how to get help in the shell using both the UNIX man pages and the GNU info pages. The next section covered some of the special features of bash, including command-line editing, command history, and command completion. Finally, you learned how to kill misbehaving processes, move processes into the background, suspend processes, and restore them to the foreground.