What is Bash?
BASH is an acronym for Bourne Again Shell, a punning name, which is a tribute to Bourne Shell (i.e., invented by Steven Bourne).
Bash is a shell program written by Brian Fox as an upgraded version of Bourne Shell program ‘sh‘. It is an open source GNU project. It was released in 1989 as one of the most popular shell distribution of GNU/Linux operating systems. It provides functional improvements over Bourne Shell for both programming and interactive uses. It includes command line editing, key bindings, command history with unlimited size, etc.
In basic terms, Bash is a command line interpreter that typically runs in a text window where user can interpret commands to carry out various actions. The combination of these commands as a series within a file is known as a Shell Script. Bash can read and execute the commands from a Shell Script.
Bash is the default login shell for most Linux distributions and Apple’s mac OS. It is also accessible for Windows 10 with a version and default user shell in Solaris 11.
Now have a look at what a Shell is known for.
Shell: A UNIX Shell is a program or a command line interpreter that interprets the user commands which are either entered by the user directly or which can be read from a file (i.e., Shall Script), and then pass them to the operating system for processing. It is important to note that Shall scripts are interpreted and not compiled, as the computer system interprets them and there is not any need to compile Shell Scripts in order of execution.
There are different types of shells available in Linux Operating Systems. Some of which are as follows:
- Bourne Shell
- C shell
- Korn Shell
- GNU Bourne Shell
To know, which shell types your operating system supports, type the command into the terminal as given below:
And to know where bash is located in your OS, type the below command and you will get a specific location:
See at the below side what shell types my centOS supports and where its bash shell is located.
