wat is shell?

am going to learn Scripting in Unix (mainly Solaris) . So i thought of asking you DBA gurus around the world what your favourite scripting language (Python, Perl,.. etc) is and your favourite Shell (csh,sh,ksh) . I found a similair post http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thre...699483&#699483

which was answered after two years(!!!) with only one reply. I guess i'll be lucky to get more than one perspective this time.

The shell is basically a program that takes your keyboard input, usually at a command prompt and gives it to the operating system to process it. You can also put shell commands into a file and execute it using "sh filename".

There are different types of shells csh, ksh, bash. bash is probably the most commonly used. Its actually very interesting. I would advise you to look up some shell scripting tutorials online. You can practice shell commands using either cygwin on windows or linux or any unix OS.

ksh seems to be the most popular shell for scripting amongst us Sybase DBAs. There are actually several books devoted exclusively to ksh scripting with Sybase servers, no books with other shells.

Our servers use csh by default, but almost all our scripts are ksh. No problems.