There are many different shells available for Unix systems. This might sound daunting if you're new to Unix, but fortunately, like most Unix tools, all the common shells adhere to certain standards. All of the common shells are derived from one of two early ancestors:

Most Unix commands are exactly the same regardless of which shell you are using. Differences will only become apparent when using more advanced command features or writing shell scripts, both of which we will cover later.

Common shells derived from Bourne shell include the following:

Common shells derived from C shell include the following:

Unix systems differ in which shells are included in the base installation, but most shells can be easily added to any Unix system using the system's package manager.

Most shells remember a configurable number of recent commands. This command history is saved both in memory and to disk, so that you can still recall this session's commands next time you log in. The exact mechanisms for recalling those commands varies from shell to shell, but some of the features common to all shells are described below.

Most modern shells support scrolling through recent commands by using the up-arrow and down-arrow keys. Only very early shells lack this capability.

The history command lists the commands that the shell currently has in memory.

shell-prompt: history
            

A command consisting of an exclamation point (!) followed by any character string causes the shell to search for the most recently executed command that began with that string. This is particularly useful when you want to repeat a complicated command.

shell-prompt: find Programs -name '*.o' -exec rm -i '{}' \;
shell-prompt: !find
            

An exclamation point followed by a number runs the command with that history index:

shell-prompt: history
   385  13;42   more output.txt
   386  13:54   ls
   387  13:54   cat /etc/hosts
shell-prompt: !386
ls
Avi-admin/            Materials-Studio/     iperf-bsd
Backup@               New-cluster/          notes
Books/                Peregrine-admin/      octave-workspace
            

Tantalizing sneak preview: We can check the history for a particular pattern such as "find" as follows:

shell-prompt: history | grep find
            

More on the "| find" in the section called “Redirection and Pipes”.

In most Unix shells, you need only type enough of a command or argument filename to uniquely identify it. At that point, pressing the TAB key will automatically fill in the rest for you. Try the following:

shell-prompt: touch sample.txt
shell-prompt: cat sam<Press the TAB key now>
            

If there are other files in your directory that begin with "sam", you may need to type a few additional characters before the TAB, like 'p' and 'l' before auto-completion will work.

Modern shells allow extensive editing of the command currently being entered. The key bindings for different editing features depend on the shell you are using and the current settings. Some shells offer a selection of different key bindings that correspond to Unix editors such as vi or Emacs.

See the documentation for your shell for full details. Below are some examples of default key bindings for shells such as bash and tcsh.

There is often a need to specify a large number of files as command line arguments. Typing all of them would be tedious, so Unix shells provide a mechanism called globbing that allows short, simple patterns to match many file names. This allows us to type a brief specification that represents a large number (a glob) of files.

These patterns are built from literal text and/or special symbols called wild cards as shown in Table 3.4, “Globbing Symbols”.

Normally, the shell handles these special characters, expanding globbing patterns to a list of matching file names before the command is executed.

If you want an argument containing special globbing characters to be sent to a command in its raw form, it must be enclosed in quotes, or each special character must be escaped (preceded by a backslash, \).

Certain commands, such as find need to receive the pattern as an argument and attempt to do the matching themselves rather than have it done for them by the shell. Therefore, patterns to be used by the find command must be enclosed in quotes.

shell-prompt: ls *.txt     # Lists all files ending in ".txt"
shell-prompt: ls "*.txt"   # Fails, unless there is a file called '*.txt'
shell-prompt: ls '*.txt'   # Fails, unless there is a file called '*.txt'
shell-prompt: ls .*.txt    # Lists hidden files ending in ".txt"
shell-prompt: ls [A-Za-z]* # Lists all files and directories
                           # whose name begins with a letter
shell-prompt: find . -name *.txt    # Fails
shell-prompt: find . -name '*.txt'  # List .txt files in all subdirectories
shell-prompt: ls *.{c,c++,f90}