Introduction What the hell is bash anyway? Before doing any kind of research, I actually had a very difficult coming up with a simple explanation. Bash is a program on your computer. This program is designed to take commands from you, the user. But bash is programmed to do a myriad of tasks. To make sure this program is efficient, a bash language has been created. This language allows you to speak to the bash program to tell it what to do. bash stands for Bourne Again SHell and it is the default shell in most of the Linux distributions and OS X. There are different kind of shells, C shell (csh), Z shell (zsh), Korn shell (ksh)... Because I'm on OS X and bash is the default shell on my machine, I'll be using this. How does it take commands? Bash has two ways to takes commands: Waits for the user to type commands in a command line interface ( usually your terminal application). This is called interactive mode . Interprets a t...