Terminal:
- A physical device that was connected to a computer to give access to a shell. you would have a large mainframe computer with many “dumb terminals” connected to it – they had no computing abilities themselves, they just sent keystrokes to the mainframe and displayed the text that was returned.
- “terminal” usually refers to a terminal emulator program, which provides the window that displays the shell and allows you to interact with it.
- The word terminal can also have a more traditional meaning of a device through which one interacts with a computer, typically with a keyboard and display.
- A terminal or a console is a piece of hardware, using which a user can interact with a host.
Shell:
- The shell is a program which is used for controlling and running programs. It is often used interactively, via a terminal.
- The shell and the terminal emulator are two separate programs; the terminal emulator displays text from the shell (and any programs you run from the shell), and sends your typing to the shell.
- shell is a special program that interacts with a user through a controlling tty and offers, to the user, the way of launching other programs (e.g. bash, csh, tcsh).
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TTY:
- TTY short for TeleTYpewriter..
- On the computer, this terminal was presented as a “TTY device”. Linux still uses TTY (or PTY, pseudo-tty) devices through which a shell can interact with a terminal emulator or console.
- A terminal or a console is a piece of hardware, using which a user can interact with a host.
Console:
- A console must be a piece of hardware physically connected to (or part of) the host. It has a special role in the system: it is the main point to access a system for maintenance and some special operation can be done only from a console (e.g. see single user mode).
- Console,sometimes used equivalent to “terminal”
- The Linux system has several text-mode “virtual consoles”, essentially built in terminal emulators that can be switched between using a key combination.
- Consoles 1 to 6 usually present a text login prompt; logging in will give you a shell. The familiar Linux graphical desktop runs on console 7 or 8 (depending on your Linux distribution)