MLUG Bash Scripting Workshop 25/04/08
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What is Bash?

Lets take a look at what the man has to say about Bash:

DESCRIPTION
  Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands
  read from the standard input or from a file. Bash also incorporates useful
  features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).

What the above assumes is that the reader knows that sh is a command language interpreter. In fact sh, a.k.a. Bourne shell, was/is the default shell in many unix variations. Bash is the GNU unix shell, the name stands for Bourne again shell. It is the default shell on most Linux systems.

In computers, shells are also known as interpreters. I don't want to get into allot of definitions but lets just see what the excellent book from O'Reilly, Linux in a Nutshell has to say about shells:

The shell is a program that acts as a buffer between you and the 
operating system. In its role as a command interpreter it should (for 
the most part) act invisibly. It can also be used for simple programming.

O.K. so there we have it, from the above it's pretty easy to figure out that Bash is a shell and as a shell it is used to interpret and execute the users's commands and that those commands can come from a file.


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