Terminal, Shell, and the Prompt

What this is. Three words get used interchangeably and they mean different things.

The terminal is the window. It draws text and collects your keystrokes. That is all it does.

The shell is the program running inside it, reading what you type and deciding what to do. Common ones are bash and zsh.

The prompt is the text the shell prints when it is ready for the next instruction.

Why this exists at all. A graphical interface shows you what is available. That is wonderful when you are exploring and terrible when you already know what you want. Clicking through forty folders to rename forty files is forty times the work of describing the rename once.

The shell is a language for describing work. Its power is not that it is faster to click, it is that instructions can be combined, repeated, and saved.

✦ The loop you are about to repeat thousands of times

The shell reads a line, runs it, prints whatever came back, and prints a new prompt. Read, evaluate, print, loop. Every single thing in this course happens inside that rhythm, which is why the prompt reappearing is the shell saying it is ready rather than something being finished.

SANKOFA SANDBOX

This is a real shell running in your browser against a fake filesystem.
Nothing you type here can touch your actual machine.
Type `help` to see what is available, or `pwd` to begin.

learner:~$

Everything in the lessons ahead runs here. If you break it, click Reset and the whole tree comes back.

Try it → Type `whoami`, then `pwd`, then `help`. Notice that each one answers and hands the prompt straight back.

Reading the prompt. In this sandbox the prompt is learner:~$. The part before the colon is who you are, the part after is where you are, and the $ marks the end of the prompt and the start of what you type. A ~ is shorthand for your home directory.

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