UNIX and Linux Shells

Рет қаралды 8,500

Күн бұрын

If all you do is use the Desktop Environment or a Window Manager, you are missing out on some of the real power of UNIX and Linux. The Shell, what is it? What Does it Do? Why do we need a shell? In this video I discuss the evolution of the shell from 1971 up through 2006, yes more has been done on shells since 2006.
Mark Paq did a great job of outlining the history of the shell on UNIX and I am going to augment that with some personal experiences with the Shell and the history I saw as they changed over time.
Mark Paq GitHub page with more links on Shells: github.com/marcpaq/shellancestry
At the end of this video I am going to include a gource (that is not mispelled) video on the development of UNIX from 1970 - 1985, it shows how UNIX grew in size and the small start with 2-3 developers growing into several thousand by 1985,
Chapters
00:00 - Intro
00:07 - Shell
00:16 - Quote
01:23 - Shell is a REPL
02:36 - Where did the shell come from?
03:16 - Mashey Shell
05:22 - Thompson Shell
06:49 - Why do we need a Shell?
08:25 - Shells of Unix (1971-2006)
10:37 - Korn Shell
11:53 - Bourne Shell
13:40 - BASH Shell
14:34 - Forsyth Shell
16:12 - Almquist Shell
17:38 - Final Thoughts
17:53 - Wrapup
Support me on Patreon: / djware
Follow me:
Twitter @djware55
Facebook: / don.ware.7758
Gitlab: gitlab.com/djware27
#Linux #UNIX #Shells

Пікірлер: 70

@bob_mosavo Жыл бұрын

If you hold the Unix shell to your ear, you can hear the C 😉

@sabinopereira1631 Жыл бұрын

Beautiful

@CMD_Line Жыл бұрын

🤣 I've not heard that for a long time!

@bob_mosavo Жыл бұрын

@@CMD_Line Yup, fortune had a lot of good things to say 🙃

@quotablecode Жыл бұрын

I'm gonna use this

@bob_mosavo Жыл бұрын

@@quotablecode Excellent 👍

@deBug67 Жыл бұрын

I really enjoy your historical knowledge in to all aspect of computing and Unix and you mange to present it in such a structured way. Great job!

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much!

@noname-ll2vk Ай бұрын

This is a really good overview of *nix shells and history. The term shell is very appropriate. If you think of a shellfish it's a surface surrounding the meat. The meat being the kernel, daemons, and programs. This is harder to visualize if you are in a gui with a virtual terminal like he's showing here. So the shell lets an operator interact with the core OS in real time, accepts input, shows output. I think of the kernel as a dark blob and the console shell environment as a transparent wrapper around it that lets you talk to the core system.

@Chris-op7yt Жыл бұрын

running (text chopping) utilities in the shell, or scripting in the shell, is pretty powerful, and consistently implemented, so you can easily pass output from one thing to another. done very well.

@ChrisPinCornwall Жыл бұрын

Don, thanks for all that you do...I wish you lived down the road so we could talk about systems old and new!

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

I would like that, Chris

@yogurtColombiano Жыл бұрын

I am a new comer to this channel, it's a great luck to discover your channel! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us around the world :)

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Welcome to the channel!

@arlaxia Жыл бұрын

This video was great! I love learning about the history of Unix. It's nice to know where all these things I use on the daily come from.

@scottdrake5159 Жыл бұрын

Your videos really are excellent. They've become the top video I reach for to share history. Thank you for releasing these.

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Very welcome, Scott

@abobader Жыл бұрын

Excellent one DJ, well done! I really did not know like 90% from the history of shell, thanks for this great info.

@CRYPTiCEXiLE Жыл бұрын

Great video!

@amontesi Жыл бұрын

Wow! Throwback to the Korn shell days, pre-linux era, and reasons why to stay away from zsh, csh and tcsh

@digitalcontent1870 Жыл бұрын

What else might be hidden inside our computers what people dont know😆Great information thanks.I need to investigate my cross platform shell immediatly.

@DrZingo_ Жыл бұрын

Interesting video. I've been using dash lately, which meant I had to rewrite a bunch of scripts. The thing I miss most from bash is 'here' redirects.

@guilherme5094 Жыл бұрын

Another great video, as always thanks DJ👍

@nightcoder5k Жыл бұрын

I started with Bourne shell (sh) on SunOS, then csh, then tcsh. Nowadays, I either use bash or zsh. With Oh-My-Zsh, zsh is quite fun to use.

@knoxduder 3 ай бұрын

Great work man.

@rodricbr Жыл бұрын

awesome, man. thanks for the knowledge

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

anytime @doom5818

@Kivencito Жыл бұрын

I love your content!

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Thanks @Kivencito

@whtiequillBj Жыл бұрын

Love your work. could you do a video on Window Powershell and its reasons for being made. Cause I'm not exactly sure of what they are other then creating a more user friendly scripting system over Visual Basic script. And my big question. Why has it not fully superseded cmd?

@judewestburner Жыл бұрын

Legacy

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Would be interesting one to do will see if I can put enough together to make a video from it, thanks for the suggestion!

@13Wirrlicht42 Жыл бұрын

One difference is that cmd can handle spaces in symlinks while pwsh can not (as of now and i do not know if they plan do add that). On my windows gaming drive i wanted to symlink the "saved games" folder into my onedrive folder (cloudsaves for games that do not support it is kinda nice) but it threw an error so i had to use cmd (can be invoked in pwsh). Maybe some other things need the ability to use spaces in a path as well.

@whtiequillBj Жыл бұрын

@@13Wirrlicht42 I think you need to quote the path to use spaces in Powershell.

@RHTORAS Жыл бұрын

Thanks! Please can you talk us about top 10 systemD free distros ? Maybe try adelie, obarun, chimera linux and super boxon to tell us what you think ? Thanks!

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

will add the request to the list

@rashie Жыл бұрын

👍👍

@MatthewSuffidy Жыл бұрын

I was just remembering the Amiga OS came with shells and I am assuming today each shell is a running process. Back then could it have made sense to use one interpreter operating on more than one set of status memory structures?

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

The first gen UNIX ran on a DEC 7 which had a total of 8Kb of RAM, 4Kb was the kernel and the other 4Kb was for apps, it just didnt have the memory to do it, today however it would be possible to do that, but then running a native app would still be faster...

@CTimmerman Жыл бұрын

My current favorite is Zsh, but i hear Fish is also great.

@willemvdk4886 Жыл бұрын

Great talk. You do know, though, that you're mentioning Linux a few times when obviously talking about Multics and UNIX?

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

i know its because these shells were ported to linux it was not an accident

@lilith1504 Жыл бұрын

I'm using exotic Fish shell

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

nice

@eugrus Жыл бұрын

How do you like PowerShell and the idea of an object oriented shell in general?

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Never tried it, so have no opinion on it @eugrus

@little-wytch Жыл бұрын

You had busybox and toybox in that chart, but I'm confused. I didn't think those were shells, I thought those were alternatives to the GNU coreutils and that they took inputs from a shell such as bash or zsh, etc.

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Hi @little-wytch, a shell is just a program like any other, the difference is a shell is designed to accept input from the user and perform whatever command the user wants. Busybox and Toybox and larger shells which include what had previously been standalone system utilities. They were created mostly for embedded devices with limited storage and memory. So that only one app (busybox or toybox) would be running...Any application can be a shell, there is nothing special about them.

@little-wytch Жыл бұрын

@@CyberGizmo Thanks for clarifying. It makes sense the way you explained it. I had this weird way of thinking of shells where the user was a composer, the keyboard was the sheet music, the coreutils were the orchestra, and the shell was the conductor that passed the sheet music instructions to the proper instruments lol. I'm happy to drop that way of thinking from my mindset because I'm really not a music person lol.

@dixztube Жыл бұрын

👁️ ❤🐠

@BG101UK Жыл бұрын

Really enjoyed that, thanks. It's always good to know a bit of history about these things we're working with today. One thing which bugs me is this change to zsh as default. Mint have done it and so have Manjaro. Half the commands I enter don't work as expected. I wonder what the reasons are for this? .. if it's just for thinks like the prompt colours etc., this can be done easily enough in BASH too, by altering a line in ~/.bashrc. Like this example: PS1='\[\033[01;32m\][\[\033[01;34m\]\u\[\033[01;32m\]@\[\033[01;35m\]\h\[\033[01;37m\] \W\[\033[01;32m\]]\[\033[01;35m\] $\[\033[00m\] '

@JohnnieWalkerGreen Жыл бұрын

myRule() { if < 25 lines ; then bash, awk, sed, grep else python; fi }

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

sounds about right :)

@QueeeeenZ Жыл бұрын

What is the difference between a terminal and a shell?

@rodricbr Жыл бұрын

the terminal is a text i/o environment. the terminal window, also known as a terminal emulator, is a text-only window that emulates a console in a gui shell stands for the command-line interpreter (cli). the shell is a program that processes and interprets kernel commands and outputs the results to the user

@QueeeeenZ Жыл бұрын

@Doom I know how to use ChatGPT

@amontesi Жыл бұрын

@@QueeeeenZ Imagine? ChatGPT... the ultimate shell

@DonThorntonJr Жыл бұрын

you said 3B2... I have a crap ton of software and QIC tapes from my time programming the 3B2 (600G/1000)

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Nice Don. I had to turn mine back into the company when I left

@tsiiphsycoii Жыл бұрын

So a shell is a bad lisp machine 😎

@MithunKalan Жыл бұрын

is ricky jay mr gupta?

@CyberGizmo Жыл бұрын

Dunno, but he did play "Pinky" in Heist

@MithunKalan Жыл бұрын

@@CyberGizmo yup. same guy. mr gupta was the techi in james bond - tomorrow never dies. his line was "i used a 32bit ssl ..." and gets cut off by jonathan pryce with "spare me the technobabble mr gupta". will check out heist tonight.

@billfarley9015 Жыл бұрын

@@MithunKalan Technobabble is necessary. Without technobabble there would be no Linux videos.