concept Bash in category linux

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Linux in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

What’s Bash?

Bash is probably the most popular UNIX shell. Great! But what’s a shell? A shell is any user interface that interprets a user’s commands, either through a command-line interface (CLI) or a graphical user interface (GUI). You can think of a shell (visualized in the figure) as a software layer meant to execute all appropriately formatted commands using the underlying kernel and hardware system resources. In other words, it’s the way you talk to your computer.

5.1. Scripting with Bash

A Linux script is a plain text file containing one or more commands compliant with Bash (or some other shell interpreter). Being able to string together multiple commands within a single file makes it possible to create executable routines that can rival programming languages in their complexity and versatility.