DEV Community

Discussion on: Explain the difference between shell, console, terminal, command line, etc. like I'm five

Collapse
 
alserembani profile image
Atif Aiman • Edited

Here is my take (with my limited knowledge though 😅, but I'll try)

I'm using the kitchen as an example.

Shell is the environment of the kitchen. Can be restaurant A's kitchen, can be restaurant B's kitchen. Every kitchen might have a different set of tools to use, so need to understand what's inside the kitchen.

The console is the kitchen's space where you put your direction to use.

The terminal is somewhat similar to a console though. There might be differences in the definition for each person, but yeah you got the idea.

Command line is the direction you use to run things, like "Chop the pineapples", "Flat the dough", "Spread the tomatoes", "Sprinkle the pineapples", and "Cook the pizza". But for every command line, you need to see whether the kitchen you are working on has tools or not to run the direction.

The command line interface (CLI), is the place you put the command line So, somewhat CLI ~ terminal.

Usually things in the kitchen, we call "dependencies". So you can say, for example, npm in CLI, is something like a deep fryer. If you don't have a deep fryer, then how can you cook the fries?

Collapse
 
alserembani profile image
Atif Aiman • Edited

To put back into context, shell is the environment you want to run your terminal/console. It can be ubuntu shell (I use ubuntu name here, but ubuntu is the OS, and ubuntu shell is the environment that runs on ubuntu, if that helps), zsh shell (macos), powershell (windows).

Console is the place you type your command line. Terminal is somewhat similar, so I would say the term are quite interchangable, but I might be wrong though.

Command line is the instruction you give to the shell. Like sudo apt update that tells ubuntu to update dependencies using apt.

For each command line, you need the dependency to run. If you try to run npm install react for example, but you didn't have npm tools inside your shell, then the shell cannot recognise your command line.