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Well, the OP already realized that they often refer to the same thing, and was just curious about the fundamental differences.

> 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.

That was already included in the question, there’s no use repeating it in the answer.

> But it misses the most obvious answer (and most likely where the question originated from): terminal, console, and shell often refer to the same thing.

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 :)

Your answer is already better than SO's, in terms of relevance to the question as asked.

...What "at watercooler" stands for?

Watercoolers are devices for dispensing cold (or hot) water from huge plastic bottles in a classic office. People go there to get their hydration fix, say hello to each other, and this ostensibly turns into a longer chat, as everyone keeps procrastinating.

I haven't seen an actual watercooler for the last 10 years, so they're probably becoming less common in tech companies.

Oh yeah, seen a ton of those in movies (but not in real life tho). Thanks

At least in tech companies, they seem to being replaced by taps that can dispense hot or cold, still or sparkling water, with optional flavors added.

"open your shell" can mean the same as "open your terminal".

One always (?) Involves the other.

The person asked for the exact differences. “All the same thing” is not only false but specifically not what they asked for.

If you can’t get a straight answer at a UNIX site, where can ya get it?

GP completes the holy SO triptych.

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.

as others have pointed out question poster wanted to know the difference , and the top answer on SO was detailed enough to explain.

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

> terminal, console, and shell often refer to the same thing.

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

Well, if you assume they don't mean GNOME Shell, but something like Bash shell, it's still easy to assume it'll work in a terminal. :-)

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.

Is it correct to say that a shell runs inside the terminal? Or that it runs (as any process does) alongside it and happens to have its input and output connected up to the terminal? I get that you don’t like pedantry, but this seems an important conceptual distinction that I (as someone who doesn’t know much about the internals of OSs) wouldn’t want to get wrong.

> Is it correct to say that a shell runs inside the terminal?

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".

I thought so. My intention was more to subtly correct parent rather than to ask a genuine question. ...although I've learnt a bit more from your reply. Thanks!

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).

I think of "console" as "point of interaction": it's the prompt that waits for input inside the shell, as well as those blinky lights on old hardware computers.