Unix Shells and Terminals

Is a Unix shell and a Unix terminal the same thing?

Unix did not start life on a personal computer. It was programmed through a teletype terminal.

You have probably seen a Unix terminal emulator before. The image below is from the macOS Terminal application. There are many of these. My favorite is iTerm2. Linux’s users may use the GNOME Terminal, or the KDE application Konsole.

Listing contents of Godot directory using Terminal application

A more generic term for these interfaces is CLI (Command Line Interface). My first exposure to a CLI was not actually a Unix system or Microsoft DOS, but on an Amiga 1000 computer running AmigaDOS in a blue CLI window.

The Amiga command line (CLI) running AmigaDOS.

So, the CLI concept is quite generic, but this article will focus on Unix command line interfaces (CLI) because they dominate modern operating systems such as Linux, macOS, and even Windows. Yes, Windows has its DOS and PowerShell CLIs, but the Unix command line is also taking over Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

The Unix command-line can be confusing to get for beginners. People get confused by the difference between a shell, such as the…