Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows.

The Bash Shell provides the ability to create symbolic names which the shell stores in memory and which can be assigned values so that it can be used repeatedly in a shell script.

Get an introduction to the Bash shell, which you can use on nearly any UNIX®-based operating system. Bash is a mature, powerful, yet easy-to-use shell that is freely available.

"Yeah, I’ve read them too. Lists of shell tricks you already know - pstree (wow!) bc (bash already has built-in math), and a dozen commands you see in every Linux site, book, and training course."

The Bash shell is the default shell environment in most Linux distributions, including all flavours of Debian. One default feature of the Bash shell is to record a history of all the commands entered by a user in a log file called .bash_history, found in the user's home directory.

In most Linux systems, your default shell is the bash shell. To find out what your current login shell is, type the following command:

The Bourne Again Shell (bash) is the default shell in almost all Linux distributions. The bash shell has a history feature which can make life easier for any serious Linux user.

A shell is a program that acts as an intermediary between the user and the Linux kernel. The shell receives commands from the user through typed words and passes them into the kernel for processing. The kernel has the ability to communicate with hardware and gather resources like files and memory. The most common shell is bash.