A shell is pretty much what you described. More accurately it’s a program for interacting with the operating system, and it usually ships with a scripting language, and Utility programs. Hence the conflation.
If you’re using Windows Terminal, you’re using a sort of predecessor to Powershell (somebody please correct me on this), if you’re using terminal on Linux, you’re most likely using bash. Enter ps -p $$ at your Linux terminal to find out (which shell you’re using).
> Useful for compiling programs, running Python scripts, and executing CLI-based programs
Yeah, so from here, it’s possible to automate those commands, if you wanted to. In windows you’re talking about .Bat or .Ps1 files. Shells are the language you use to write those scripts, and they typically ship with access to some useful (file/text oriented) commands.
The only problem is these shells were invented in the 80s 90s, and have awful conventions that make some people miserable enough that they go and write a new shell that tosses previous conventions out the window. And IMO they did a great job.
It blows my mind that they have a proper team behind WT now (for a while now), and it has already (in my mind) surpassed MacOS Terminal (unchanged for years) and most of Linux Terminal Emulators.
If Microsoft can just get a proper team behind the other tech...
If you’re using Windows Terminal, you’re using a sort of predecessor to Powershell (somebody please correct me on this), if you’re using terminal on Linux, you’re most likely using bash. Enter ps -p $$ at your Linux terminal to find out (which shell you’re using).
> Useful for compiling programs, running Python scripts, and executing CLI-based programs
Yeah, so from here, it’s possible to automate those commands, if you wanted to. In windows you’re talking about .Bat or .Ps1 files. Shells are the language you use to write those scripts, and they typically ship with access to some useful (file/text oriented) commands.
The only problem is these shells were invented in the 80s 90s, and have awful conventions that make some people miserable enough that they go and write a new shell that tosses previous conventions out the window. And IMO they did a great job.