Work on the Command Line

Distributions

Lots of different 'distros' out there. Think of the kernel as a car's engine and a distro as the car's features. Whilst all distro's have the Linux kernel (car engine) at their core, their various features are different. Think of a car rental, you have to take a few minutes to adjust the seat, view the various car controls and figure how to use them prior to driving off. This is the same with different distro's.

As of July 2020, the recommended distro's to use are Ununtu 18.04 and Centos 7 Enterprise. I use Multipass and have installed these 2 on my Windows 10 laptop. Another option is to install openSUSE 15 Leap distro??

Linux Shell Options

• BASH (The GNU Bourne Again shell - Bash) - 1989. Unix used the Bourne shell (named after its creator), Available for Windows 10, macOS and Solaris

• DASH (Debian Almquist Shell - Dash) - 2002. A smaller shell, with no command line editing or command history, but has a faster shell program execution (script)

• KornShell -1983 and was proprietary until 2000. David Korn,Bell Labs

• tcsh - 1981. The TENEX C Shell is a upgraded version of the C Shell.

• Z shell - 1990 - incorporates features from Bash, Korn Shell and tcsh

On Unix systems the system shell (bash) was installed here /bin/sh On Linux systems the /bin/sh file is a symbolic link. On Centos the symbolic link points to the Bash shell whilst on Ubuntu it points to the Dash shell (Debian Almquist shell)

Centos

[centos@vm1 ~]$ readlink /bin/sh
bash

centos@vm1 ~]$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

Ubuntu

ubuntu@vm2:~$ readlink /bin/sh
dash

ubuntu@vm2:~$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash