Shell Tutorial
Author: Dustin Enyeart
Date: August 2025
Description: Get up and running with the shell using Bash!
Audience: Anyone
Estimated Time: 1 hour
Introduction
Developers primarily communicate with computer through text. Text offers much more control and reproducibility than a GUI. The shell is a text-based interface to the operating system. The shell is also called the command line or terminal.
This tutorial uses the shell language Bash. Most Linux distributions use Bash. Mac uses Zsh, which is basically Bash. On Windows, Bash is used through Git Bash or WSL.
The default shell on Windows is PowerShell.
Overall, it is similar to Bash.
The biggest difference from Bash is that it primarily uses backslashes \ instead of forward slashes / for paths.
The program cygpath helps with Converting between native backslash paths syntax and the forward slash for Git BASH or WSL.