The bash shell is one of the many shells that are available to you on the GL network. I chose to mention this one as well because almost any home installation of Linux defaults to the bash shell.
bash is one the many GNU.org (http://www.gnu.org) projects. A comprehensive online manual is provided at http://www.gnu.org/manual/bash-2.05a/.
To save you some time, here are some of the sections that I talked about during class...