Understanding Shells
A shell is an interface that enables users to interact with the operating system. A shell isn’t considered an application because of its inescapable nature, but it’s the same as any other process running on a system. The difference between a shell and an application is that a shell’s purpose is to enable users to run other applications. In some operating systems (such as UNIX, Linux, and VMS), the shell is a command-line interface (CLI); in other operating systems (such as Windows and Mac OS X), the shell is typically a graphical user interface (GUI).
Both CLI and GUI shells have benefits and drawbacks. For example, most CLI shells allow powerful command chaining (using commands that feed their output into other commands ...
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