Apple tiger is a shell, as is terminal. A shell is the direct interface by
which we instruct the computer to do something. The real operating system
is a flavor of unix which does the heavy lifting in the computer. By using
icons or keying in commands at the terminal prompt we talk to the operating
system. When we copy a file by dragging and dropping an icon of it or use
the cp command in terminal we perform the same function of telling the
operating system to make a copy of a file.
The shell is also a way to talk to programs and utilities. There are many
many programs and utilities which can only be used in terminal because the
tiger shell does not talk to them. These come with the unix flavor that is
the apple operating system.
XB
IC|XC
