Introduction to Shell Programming

The shell is a program which interacts with the UNIX OS and the User. That gives a user interface to the Operating System which listens for user commands that does the necessary translations and tells the system to execute them. A Bourne shell is the orginal UNIX Command interpreter. Above the years, new interpreters based on the Bourne Shell have been established. The most popular ones are the Korne shell (ksh) and bach(Bourne Again Shell). The Bourne shell is also the preferred selection to build shell scripts.a