Shell Environment

By Joe Gardiner Monday, 12th April 2010

A shell is a program that allows the user direct access into the operating system. It is called a shell because it acts as the layer between the user and the "soft" insides of the operating system, called the kernel. A shell is generally a command line interface. If you're using a Mac, type "Terminal" into spotlight, or on Windows search for cmd.exe to see what a command line interface is! Some shells do use a Graphical User Interface.

Generally shells are used for launching applications, but they can also be used for viewing and changing the contents of directories and files. This is particularly useful when transferring files from your computer to the web server that stores your website. for this reason CLI's are commonly used on servers with large numbers of file transfer operations being carried out by expert administrators.

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