Fortunately the top answer doesn't suffer from that issue as far as I can tell. It is much longer and explains both the etymology of the terms and how they are used today.
Then we can dig into actual differences: the shell is actually an application that runs inside the terminal/console, and you can swap in your favorite shell app; on MacOS, the Console and Terminal apps look similar, but Terminal is what you should use normally, with Console more for debugging system outputs. And so on.
Humor people with practical answers sometimes, for christsake, instead of these agonzing pendantic expositions. Side notes on pseudo-ttys, ioctl, virtual condoles, and control sequences when the OP posted an elementary question?? Yeah, we get it, professor: you are overburdened with information which you must share.
> Side notes on pseudo-ttys, ioctl, virtual condoles, and control sequences when the OP posted an elementary question?? Yeah, we get it, professor: you are overburdened with information which you must share.
I don't know if it's elementary but I knew ioctl long before I learned that "tty" stands for teletypewriter. (Top answer: "tty is a strange abbreviation". Me: ha, sure, because if you are curious enough to look up for the abbreviation, the long form itself is pretty much self explanatory).
The answer doesn't feel condescending to me. Similarly, my professor talked to me like that when I was a student and I didn't find that condescending -- it's just a person who knows a particular topic better than me trying to make a gentle introduction.
If someone not only answered my question, but also voluntarily spent another hour telling me all the background stories, I would have nothing but gratitude. Sure, some of those people may not be the nicest person in the world. if you just need a quick answer and be done, you can ask ChatGPT to summarize it.
If you can’t get a straight answer at a UNIX site, where can ya get it?
One person asks for the specifics of an obscure technical thing. A second person gives a detailed answer with a ton of explanation which thoroughly answers the question. A third person projects their frustration with thorough answers onto this interaction, and laments that nobody gives good answers anymore dagnabit, while missing that their proposed answer is in fact a terrible fit for the question that was asked.
Bonus points for calling someone professor in a derogatory way are cancelled out by (predictably) misspelling chrissakes.
there was nothing condescending about at-least the top few answers ( i didnt go through all of them) and ironically by being snarky here , you are being the very thing you accuse SO of
Not really. If you ask people at watercooler which _shell_ they are using you are getting 20 minutes conversation about whether zsh is better than fish or vice versa. And if you ask same question about _terminal_ it would be mostly about whether their favorite terminal is GPU accelerated and supports ligatures :)
I haven't seen an actual watercooler for the last 10 years, so they're probably becoming less common in tech companies.
One always (?) Involves the other.
Nope. We use the word "terminal" nowadays to refer to a piece of software that is a terminal emulator. But the thing being emulated is what used to be called a "dumb terminal", which was a piece of hardware that couldn't itself run user software.
"Shell" is the odd man out among these terms; a shell is always a piece of software.
A terminal isn't necessarily a text device. I remember graphics terminals by Tektronix and Apollo. I never saw a blit terminal, but those things existed too.
On SystemV, the console was simply the privileged terminal. My memory is poor, but I seem to recall that (a) there could only be one console, which had to be connected to a specific port; (b) you could only become root if you were on the console.
On some early computers, I believe the term "console" referred to the panel of lights and toggle-switches on the case of the processor. The switches could be used to control memory contents and processor state; so OG wizards were said to be able to e.g. "toggle in the bootloader from the console".
MacOS seems to still have something called Console which functions somewhat similarly to what you describe (the panel of lights and toggle-switches, rather than a two-way communication device).
often, but not always. if someone tells me they made a terminal program to me it means that it can run without any gui. particularly i can run it in tty and without a windowing system. if someone tells me they made a shell program then its much harder for me to assume the above. actually it probably just means a shell script
A pure shell program (without a TUI library like ncurses) is just a more broad concept, as it would also work outside a terminal in something like Emacs' eshell, but it'll always work in a terminal too.