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Ask HN: Why is it called a shell?
Would anyone like to offer how or why the command line interpreter came to be known as a shell?
- apples2apples 13y agoCame from Unix. A "shell to the kernel" that only exposed the outer layer.
- david4096 13y agoHave a source?
- apples2apples 13y agoNot really, the internet points to this doc: http://www.multicians.org/shell.html http://www.multicians.org/shell.html Where Louis Pouzin of Multics claims to have coined it. Ken Thompson describes it here http://v6shell.org/history/unix/unix.pdf http://v6shell.org/history/unix/unix.pdf Looking around, this seems more interesting (implying it is a metaphorical name of a prophet's shell listening): http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14934/why-was-the-word-shell-used-to-descibe-a-command-line-interface http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14934/why-was-the-wo...