Shells come equipped to perform certain functions. Most (Professional web hosting)
Shells come equipped to perform certain functions. Most of these featureshave evolved over time to assist the command-line jockey with myriad tasks. Although I only scratch the surface here, you re encouraged to readthe manpage for bashbecause it s likely one of the more complete and read- able manpages in existence. You can read all about how to use manpages (the online Help system in Linux) in the Help! section, later in this chapter. Playing the Shell GameYou need a way to tell the computer what you want it to do. In Linux, one ofthe ways to communicate with the computer is through something called theshell. A shellisn t a graphical thing; it s the sum total of the commands andsyntax you have available to you to do your work. The shell environment is rather dull and boring by graphical desktop stan- dards. When you start the shell, all you see is a short prompt, such as a $, followed by a blinking cursor awaiting your keyboard entry. (Later in this section, I show you a couple of methods for accessing the shell.) The default shell used in Linux is the bashshell. This work environment isbased on the original Unix shell, which is called the Bourne shell and is alsoreferred to as sh. The term bashstands for the Bourne again shell. The bashshell comes with most Linux distributions. If you installed your Linux distribution to log in to a graphical desktop, suchas GNOME or the KDE environment, you re likely not looking at a shell prompt. Rather, you interact with your computer via a mouse. You can start a bashsession from within the GUI desktop in a couple ways. The quickest method to activate a bashsession is to: Fedora:Right-click on your desktop and choose Open Terminal from thecontext menu that pops up. Mandrake:Click the Terminal Program icon on your Panel. (It looks likea computer monitor.) SuSE:Click the Terminal Program icon on your Panel. (It looks like acomputer monitor with a shell on it get it? shell?) Notice that not all the distributions covered here offer a shortcut on the panelor desktop. Instead, you can also choose commands from each program smain menu unless otherwise specified: Linspire:Choose Programs.Utilities.Console. Fedora: Choose Applications.System Tools.Terminal. 278Part III:Getting Up to Speed with Linux