About Bash

Bash is actually the shell, a command-line interface (CLI) and can take commands from the keyboard and send the instructions to the operating system. All happens in a terminal emulator (terminal). Bash is an abbrevation for Bourne-Again SHell, written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project and is an upgraded version of the original shell sh, by Steve Bourne. If we look in the manual, man bash we can see that it is also:

Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input or from a file.

At the time of writing this, another shell is used on the student server, tcsh. We can see which shell is used with the command echo $0:

klwstud@sweet: echo $0
-tcsh

Other shells include: ksh och zsh.

Everything you can do on the command line in the terminal you can also execute in a Bash script and vice versa. In other words, we can collect a set of commands in a file and execute it so that the commands are executed as if we had written them directly in the terminal. Very smooth.

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