The shell handles your interaction with the system. When you are typing all these commands into PuTTY or whatever you are using, you are typing into the shell. The dollar sign '$' is the shell prompt. There are many types out there, and they all behave slightly differently and need to be configured in different ways. Examples include the Bourne Shell (sh), C Shell (csh), Korn Shell (ksh) and the Bourne Again Shell (BASH). The default shell we run is BASH. For more information see Using the Shell.

In this section, we will show you how to change many things about the BASH shell to suit your tastes.

Firstly lets look at the Bash .config files.