I have two files called foobar and foo.bar . I want to delete foo.bar . Both foobar and foo.bar start with fo , but it was able to complete to foo . Once I typed in . , then hit TAB again, the shell was able to fill in the rest of the filename for me. Another function of the shell is environment variables.
Environment variables are a variable key pair stored in the shell's environment space.
This space can be read by any program invoked by the shell, and thus contains a lot of program configuration. PATH Colon separated list of directories to search for binaries. The current shell. The name of the user's terminal. Used to determine the capabilites of the terminal.