Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Essentials

By : Neil Smyth
1 (1)
Book Image

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Essentials

1 (1)
By: Neil Smyth

Overview of this book

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is one of the most secure and dependable operating systems available. For this reason, the ambitious system or network engineer will find a working knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise 8 to be an invaluable advantage in their respective fields. This book, now updated for RHEL 8.1, begins with a history of Red Enterprise Linux and its installation. You will be virtually perform remote system administration tasks with cockpit web interface and write shell scripts to maintain server-based systems without desktop installation. Then, you will set up a firewall system using a secure shell and enable remote access to Gnome desktop environment with virtual network computing (VNC). You’ll share files between the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) and Windows System using Samba client and NFS. You will also run multiple guest operating systems using virtualization and Linux containers, and host websites using RHEL 8 by installing an Apache web server. Finally, you will create logical disks using logical volume management and implement swap space to maintain the performance of a RHEL 8 system. By the end of this book, you will be armed with the skills and knowledge to install the RHEL 8 operating system and use it expertly.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
32
Index

8.1 What is a Shell?

The shell is an interactive command interpreter environment within which commands may be typed at a prompt or entered into a file in the form of a script and executed. The origins of the shell can be traced back to the early days of the UNIX operating system. In fact, in the early days of Linux before the introduction of graphical desktops the shell was the only way for a user to interact with the operating system.

A variety of shell environments have been developed over the years. The first widely used shell was the Bourne shell, written by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs.

Yet another early creation was the C shell which shared some syntax similarities with the C Programming Language and introduced usability enhancements such as command-line editing and history.

The Korn shell (developed by David Korn at Bell Labs) is based on features provided by both the Bourne shell and the C shell.

The default shell on RHEL 8 is the Bash shell (shorthand for Bourne...