Neither of those really have anything to do with the shell? And it's not like it's all impossible to do yourself without the shell there's just a lot and the s

Neither of those really have anything to do with the shell? And it's not like it's all impossible to do yourself without the shell there's just a lot and the shell does it in a nice and well known way. Here are some examples: Searching the path Setting custom environment variables builtins One weird one that I feel like a lot of people don't know about is that you can run shell scripts from the shell without the shebang. But if you exec one you'll get a format error. It's not good to rely on this but it's another thing that surprises people with messy scripts.