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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
~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.