Shells & Scripting: An Overview

What a shell is, Bash vs PowerShell vs Batch, when to script — and the sample files used throughout the course.

A shell is the program that reads your commands in a terminal and runs them. A shell script is a file of those commands, run as a program. Engineers use scripts every day to build and flash firmware, run test suites, collect logs, set up machines and glue tools together — anything done more than twice is worth a script.

Choosing

Copying a Bash script to Windows and running it with cmd.exe

Run it with bash (WSL, Git Bash) — or rewrite it in PowerShell

Each shell has its own syntax. Bash, PowerShell and Batch scripts are not interchangeable.

What is the main difference between how Bash and PowerShell pipelines work?

Bash pipes text (bytes) between programs; PowerShell pipes .NET objects with properties, so commands can sort, filter and select by property names.