I have been using Ubuntu for a short period of time. I have seen the term "bash" in many places, including a terminal. I have still not understood what it is.
Can somebody please explain clearly?
Expansion for Bash is Bourne Again shell.
Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, for the GNU
operating system. The name is an acronym for the ‘Bourne-Again SHell’,
a pun on Stephen Bourne, the author of the direct ancestor of the
current Unix shell sh, which appeared in the Seventh Edition Bell Labs
Research version of Unix.
Bash is largely compatible with sh and incorporates useful features
from the Korn shell ksh and the C shell csh. It is intended to be a
conformant implementation of the IEEE POSIX Shell and Tools portion of
the IEEE POSIX specification (IEEE Standard 1003.1). It offers
functional improvements over sh for both interactive and programming
use.
While the GNU operating system provides other shells, including a
version of csh, Bash is the default shell. Like other GNU software,
Bash is quite portable. It currently runs on nearly every version of
Unix and a few other operating systems - independently-supported ports
exist for MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows platforms.
