From the course: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Essential Training

The shell environment - Linux Tutorial

From the course: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Essential Training

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The shell environment

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- [Instructor] By default, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 installs the Gnome desktop, which is a graphical user interface. Although there are many advantages to using a graphical environment, when you're looking to automate execution of tasks, the shell can be very powerful. The default shell in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is bash, which is also known as the Bourne Again Shell, and let me show you how to get there. There's a couple ways. Shell is run in what is commonly called the terminal, and you can get there by right clicking on the desktop, and opening the terminal. And it gives you more of a text-based interface. You can also go to applications, utilities, choose xTerm, which is more of a graphically oriented interface. So I'm gonna work with terminal here, and expand it, and this is where you'll run various shell scripts to perform operations and tasks. Many shell scripts that you run will use variables to describe the shell environment that you're in, and you can view those by using the env command, and getting a list of those that are available. Your environment is set by a group of shell scripts that are run, depending on whether you're logging in or simply opening another shell. All of this is conducted in a root file system organized into various directories. If you want to learn more about shells and shell scripting, you'll find more courses in our library. As a bonus to this video, there are a couple of things that I wish I knew when I started out, that I want to show you, so you can get around a little bit better in the shell environment. You can see on my screen that it's rolled off the screen, and you can't see what's above it. If you hold down the shift key, and hit page up, you can see what's in the buffer, and shift page down will bring you back down. If the screen gets a little cluttered, you can type clear and that will clear the screen. And sometimes you'll do things which are too long, and you wish you could save them off to look at them later, so if we do an example here, like getting a directory listing, it's gonna run off the screen, and we may want to look at that later, so what you can do is, you can simply add on a greater than sign and the name of a file, and it will save that output off to a file for you to look at later. So hopefully you've got a better idea of what the shell environment is like in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

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