>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Bush <dlb.id...@gmail.com> writes:
Daniel> whoa jam! Fanning the dying embers of this thread a bit Daniel> aren't we! Indeed. When I was teaching basic Unix skills, we taught the shell as being two things: a shell around the kernel (think a nut) that allows users to interact with the system, or a shell around the user (like a hermit crab) through which the user interacts with the system. The user's shell can be anything --- it can be a graphical desktop, or a command line, or a single app. (think appliance mode systems). For maximum versatility an interactive scripting language was traditionally used as a user's shell --- the Bourne shell, the C-shell, the Korn shell etc. POSIX standardised on a shell not too far from the Korn shell (basically, Bourne shell with some features from tcsh and the System-V modified Bourne shell). Nowadays, the user shell field in /etc/passwd is what's used as a scripting language and what's run in an xterm, rather than the primary way to interact with the system for most people. And yes, one could use python as a shell if one wanted to. Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
