Ken Wilson wrote:
jam wrote:
On Wednesday 26 August 2009 10:00:06 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
The point about shells has already been made, but some people have got a
bit sidetracked. Shells are command-interpreters; they mediate
between the
user and the kernel. Applications in Unix, as has already been said,
get
to run because a shell is spawned by the fork() system process. This
is as
true for GUI applications as for command-line text ones.
[snip]
<old fart mode> not with standing, not stupid, so I do know that
opining that GUI s are slow and cumbersome compared to the CLI will
provoke ummm response. What did surprise me was that the list of
things GUIs *are* good at was not emphasized at all. Kinda like going
to the YR12 ball in a F1 car rather than a stretch limo.
Hearking back to Marghanita's original query: shells are an important
part of the system and Wine, Java etc are apps not shells.
Thanks for lively criticism :-)
James
Both GUIs and shells are just human interfaces for people to talk to
computers, instructions are then translated to machine language for the
computer.
Ken
There is a nice write up here:
<http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Unix_command_shell>
and another aspect of Unix, which seems to have repeated
itself (or not?) with "unix-like" linux is the different flavours:
Solaris, BSD, AIX, Ultrix (now apparently known as HPUX).
As of 2007, the owner of the trademark is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only
systems fully compliant with and certified according to the Single UNIX Specification are qualified
to use the trademark; others are called "Unix system-like" or "Unix-like".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix>
Marghanita
--
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202
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