What is a difference between ‘Operating System’ and ‘Command Shell’?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
A shell and an OS are different. Let me explain.
An operating system is a program initiated by either the BIOS or EFI. The OS controls the very low-level aspects of the hardware and provides APIs to software to use them. OSes are usually a collection of a kernel and a bunch of applications. Examples of OSes are Window$, Mac OS X, UNIX, Ubuntu, Solaris. Note that Linux is not an OS, but rather a kernel, which is the most important part of an OS.
A shell is an application that runs on the OS and provides the user interface to the OS. Examples of shells are bash, sh, cmd.exe and windowserver.app.
Usually an OS comes packed with one or more shells.