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

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.