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Using the Shell

As you have been reading this book, you've been interacting with the shell already. The shell is the program that reads your commands and then does what you ask it to. In this chapter, you explore the shell in greater detail, with a special eye towards customizing the shell to work as you want it to.

Subsections

• Environment Variables
• Where Commands Reside: The PATH Variable
• Configuration Files
  • System-Wide Versus User-Specific
    Configuration
• Aliases
• Controlling Input and Output
  • stdin, stdout, Pipelines, and Redirection
• Filename Expansion