🐧How many Linux shells are there?

Photo by George Girnas on Unsplash

… I found 15:

+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  #  |  name                                                      |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  1  |  The Bourne Shell  | sh                                    | +-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  2  |  The Bash Shell    | bash                                  |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  3  |  The C shell       | csh                                   |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  4  |  The Korn Shell    | ksh                                   | +-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  5  |  The ZSH Shell     | zsh                                   |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  6  |  The TENEX C Shell | tcsh                                  |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  7  |  The Fish Shell    | fish                                  | +-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  8  |  The Ion shell     | ion                                   |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  9  |  The Dash Shell    | dash                                  | 
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  10 |  Eshell            | eshell                                | +-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  11 |  The rc Shell      | rc                                    |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  12 |  The Scheme Shell  | scsh                                  |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  13 |  The Xonsh Shell   | xonsh                                 | +-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  14 |  The Oh Shell      | oh                                    |
+-----+------------------------------------------------------------+
|  15 |  The Elvish Shell  | elvish                                | 
+-----+----------------------------------------------------------[1]

Which shell am I currently using?

To find out which shell you’re using, go ahead and execute either of the following commands on your terminal:

echo $0

alternatively,

echo $SHELL

(https://askubuntu.com/questions/590899/how-do-i-check-which-shell-i-am-using)

Which shells are available in my device?

There are at least two ways to check which shells are available in your device. Using a cat command:

cat /etc/shells

(https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/140286/how-to-find-list-of-available-shells-by-command-line)

Or the following regular expression:

grep '^[^#]' /etc/shells

(https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/list-out-all-the-shells-using-linux-commands/)

DO NOT MISS

In reading stuff to learn about this/prepare this short post, this translator/comparator came up:

https://hyperpolyglot.org/unix-shells

It documents syntax differences between bash, fish, ksh, tcsh and zsh.

Background

What is a shell

A shell is a program that provides an interface between a user and an operating system (OS) kernel.[2]

>>> did I unintentionally leave any out? Please let me know!

__________________________________________________________________

[1] https://www.ubuntupit.com/linux-shell-roundup-15-most-popular-open-source-linux-shells/

[2] https://www.thegeekdiary.com/unix-linux-what-is-a-shell-what-are-different-shells/

[3] https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/chpass/

Consulted:

• https://opensource.com/business/16/3/top-linux-shells