A shell prompt typically gives you some sort of useful information. The prompt simply just sits there and stares at you waiting for you to do something interesting, like give it a command to execute. When the shell is started it displays a prompt or a shell prompt. Given the choice of using the command line for web browsing or a graphical web browser such as Firefox, I would choose Firefox any day. So you can surf the web from the command line. There are command line web browsers that come with Linux. For example, if I'm working on a Linux desktop and I wanna visit Wikipedia on the web, I would start a graphical web browser like Firefox, for instance. When it makes sense to use a graphical program, use that program. When it makes sense to use the command line, use the command line. This allows you to have the best of both worlds. This will give you access to the command line interface as well.ĭesktop Linux distributions have both graphical user interfaces as well as command line interfaces. Also when you're connecting to a Linux system over the network, you're typically going to be connecting via SSH or secure shell. Most server additions of Linux distributions do not include a graphical interface. Another reason you wanna be familiar with the command line and be able to use it effectively is that it's always going to be there. In this instance the command line is a much better solution. If you are using the graphical user interface, you would have to click on the first file, rename it go to the next while and do that a hundred times. For example if you had 100 documents that you needed to rename, you could run a command at the shell to do all 100 at once. For example, if you have several files and you need to perform the same operation on those files you can often do this easily at the shell. The command line interface can be more powerful than the graphical interface. Sometimes you'll hear the shell referred to as a command line interpreter. The shell is really nothing more than an application or a program that takes the commands you feed it, and it executes those commands for you. However, if someone isn't specific and they say shell, they're typically talking about the command line interface. The graphical user interface on a Linux system is also called a shell, it's a graphical shell. Start typing the word terminal and you should see the terminal application pop up and you can click on it to start it. It's the icon with the Ubuntu logo on it. To do that you click on the top icon in the launcher which is on the left-hand side of your screen. In Ubuntu, you need to start a program called the dash.
In CentOS for example, you can go to the applications menu then system tools and click on terminal. If you log into a graphical user interface then you'll need to start a terminal emulator application to gain access to the shell. Also if you're presented with a text-based login prompt, you'll also be interacting with the shell by default. When you log into a Linux server over the network, the shell is the program that is started and it acts as your default interface to the system. The shell is the default user interface to a Linux system.
#35S EMULATOR MAC HOW TO#
In today's lesson, you will learn what the shell is, how to access it, and we'll talk a little bit about the superuser account.