xterm

[the bassinvader]

Hi guys

This may be a stupid question but i dont understand the difference between xterm and a shell. Aren't they both the sane thing?

[tech_man]

xterm is a shell.

[Cabhan]

Alrighty.

The shell is the environment that runs everything for you. It executes your programs, has environment variables, redirects your output, etc. The most common Linux shell is called Bash. Bash stands for "Bourne Again Shell", since it is an evolution of sh, the "Bourne Shell". Other popular shells are ZSH and csh (the C Shell).

Your commandline interface is provided by a terminal: a text environment that displays the shell prompt, and which displays output and accepts input. If you press Ctrl-Alt-F1, you will see a terminal.

xterm (and aterm, and Eterm, and rvxt, etc.) are terminal emulators. These are programs that are graphical (run on an X server) that provide a commandline interface, just as a terminal does.

Does that make sense?

[the bassinvader]

Yes....thankyou.

I knew there was some distinction between the two. Thanks for clearing it up

[rm_-rf_windows]

Here are some other shells: bash, sh, ash, csh, ksh, tcsh, zsh... You can try these shells out simply by typing the name of the shell into a terminal. Before you do that, you might want to know what shell you are using. To find out, try this:

[yourusername@yoursystemname currentdirectoryname] $ echo $0

To change shells, simply type in the name of the shell you'd like to try out:

[yourusername@yoursystemname currentdirectoryname] $ csh

Then if you type in "echo $0" you should see that your current shell has changed.

To see what shells you have available, do this:

ls /bin

Commands and configuration can be slightly different from shell to shell. Try a few out to see which you prefer.

I imagine you always use a terminal emulator when you run commands (xterm, kterm, gnome-terminal)... Try a virtual terminal: Ctrl+Alt+F1 (TO GET BACK TO WHERE YOU LEFT OFF: Ctrl+Alt+F7 or Ctrl+Alt+F5 depending on your setup). Ctrl+Alt+ ... F1 through F6 (or F4 on some distros) are used to get a virtual terminal. You can log in as several different users at the same time and toggle from one terminal to another.

Later you'll be able to create your own "shortcuts" or your own commands. "Shell scripts" are one or more commands accessed from a file rather than standard input (the keyboard).

Welcome to Linux and to Linux Forums!