How to find out which shell I am running?

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How to find out which shell I am running?

There are many different shells available on Linux based systems: bash, zsh, tcsh, csh, just to name a few. So how do we find out which shell we are currently in?

The echo command

Simple, we just execute a one-liner. As always, the first dollar $ symbol should be omitted because it is only a prompt indicating that we are logged in as a regular user.

$ echo $0

This gives us the following output which shows that we are in a bash shell.

-bash

The ps command

As always, there is more than one way to do the same thing in Linux:

$ ps -p $$

The ps command gives us slightly more output but it is still very easy to see which shell you are in.

  PID TTY           TIME CMD
27848 ttys002    0:01.72 -bash

Further Information

For further information on either the echo or ps commands, type:

$ man echo
...

$ man ps
...