File:X-Window-System.png · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
operating system shell
Sign in to saveAlso known as shell, command shell, command-line shell, OS shell, graphical shell
System software, that provides interfaces and exposes an operating system's services to a human user or other program
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- software category
- Subclass of
- system software
- Image
- KDE Plasma 5.26 screenshot.png
- Said to be same as
- user interface
Show 6 more facts
- different from
- command-line interpreter
- partially coincident with
- command-line interpreter
- topic's main category
- Category:Command shells
- Commons category
- Command shells
- facet of
- operating system
- Stack Exchange tag
- vi.stackexchange.com/tags/shell
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~14 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A graphical interface similar to one from the late 1980s, which features a graphical window for a man page, a shaped window (oclock) as well as several iconified windows. In the lower right we can see a terminal emulator running a Unix shell, in which the user can type commands as if they were sitting at a terminal.
An operating system shell is a computer program that provides relatively broad and direct access to the system on which it runs. The term shell refers to how it is a relatively thin layer around an operating system.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “operating system shell” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.