Ssh – Confusion over terminology SSH, Shell, Terminal, Command Prompt and Telnet

command-line-interfaceshellsshtelnetterminal

I don't usually use SSH if I can get away with it, but if I have to I do of course, and I've seemingly done this for years while still managing to remain slightly confused about these different terms … from my basic research, this is my understanding, could someone verify/correct this?

  • Telnet … before SSH, not secure
  • SSH … ( secure shell ) the general name of the system/protocol
  • Shell … short name for SSH
  • Command Line/Command Prompt … the windows version
  • Terminal … the Unix version, also used by apple.

Two further questions:

  1. What is the Linux version commonly called, is it just called SSH ?
  2. What is bash ?

EDIT … not 100% convinced about the structure of my question above … note to reader the above definitions to a certain extent turned out to be a bit off, see the answers below for better definitions

Best Answer

  • Telnet provides the ability to communicate with a service, nothing more nothing less. If that service happens to be a shell on a server, great, but it's not always. I often use telnet to send a malformed HTTP request manually, or to manually run commands against an SMTP server.

  • SSH is way more than just a way of logging on to a server remotely. It can be used as a proxy to access remote services from your local computer, and it can be used as a protocol to run other protocols over (like scp)

  • A Shell is the name given to a command-line interpreter that runs on a computer to figure out what you're wanting to do and tries to do it. This could be sh, bash, csh, tcsch or even command.com

  • Command Line is the DOS shell, usually associated with Microsoft operating systems.

  • A terminal is ambiguous. It could be the OS X name for the shortcut to their shell. It could also be a physical thing that was used to interface with the shell of a multi-user Unix server (a popular one is the VT-100)

What is the Linux version commonly called, is it just called SSH ?

SSH is just a protocol that can access the shell of the server. It is extremely common, but there's also the older and insecure rsh or you can even log in to your Linux server with telnet if you're so inclined.

What is bash ?

It's a shell

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