mrgoblin

Hi! It is the pilot episode of "Linux giggles" - series where I post about Linux for beginners. Today I will tell you about terminal and shell.

Terminals were physical devices with a keyboard for input and screen or printer for output (ones with printer are called teletypes). They were the only way to interact with a computer.

But now most users have a keyboard and monitor or laptop screen, so physical terminals are dead. Instead of those we have terminal emulators such as xterm, Konsole, st, Alacritty and others. Which one do you use?

A program called shell shows you a prompt, takes your input (the command line), splits it into arguments and runs the command. On your system it mostly will be sh, bash or zsh.

Basically, when you start a terminal emulator, it runs the shell. You will see the prompt which probably will show your username, hostname and current working directory:

rex@debian:~$

The "~" (tilde) represents your home directory. The real path to your home is usually /home/your_username. It can also be useful to know that you can access to some user's home with ~the_username.

Please leave a comment. See you!