As you know, Linux consists of some major parts, such as the kernel, the shell, and the GUI interface (Gnome, KDE, and so on).
The shell translates your commands and sends them to the system. Most Linux distributions are shipped with many shells.
Every shell has its own features, and some of them are very popular among developers today. These are some of the popular ones:
- Sh shell: This is called the Bourne shell, this was developed at AT&T labs in the 70s by a guy named Stephen Bourne. This shell offers many features.
- Bash shell: Also called the Bourne again shell, this is very popular and compatible with sh shell scripts, so you can run your sh scripts without changing them. We are going to use this shell in this book.
- Ksh shell: Also called the Korn shell, this is compatible with sh and bash. Ksh offers some enhancements over the Bourne shell.
- Csh and tcsh: Linux was built using the C language and that drove developers at Berkeley University to develop a C-style shell in which the syntax is similar to the C language. Tcsh adds some minor enhancements to csh.
Now we know the types of shells and we know that we are going to use bash, so what is bash scripting?
