Chapter 7.8 Bash Shell Startup

On first reading, this is a bit confusing, login and interactive environments
 "An interactive login shell is started after a successful login, using /bin/login, by reading the /etc/passwd file"

My question involves visualization. How do I know that a login shell has started? Is it that I am allowed entry to the command line? Or, is the command line part of the "shell".  I think it is useful to think of it as opening a door to a house and entering, then one can do some stuff (like run some comand line commands) and then leave.

I have always associated a shell with an xterm but they are not one and the same. One can run multiple shells in one xterm, for example. Although I do not like to do this (hence my tangent in Chapter 6 regarding the color of the lfs window).

" A non-interactive shell is usually present when a shell script is running. It is non-interactive because it is processing a script and not waiting for user input between commands." So, maybe the non-interactive shell is like the shell of a car (or a sea shell? can that be its origin?). The act of driving will be the script.

Back to the text, we are creating the profile file here. This is read just after log in and sets all sorts of variables (environment)

root:/etc# LC_ALL=en_US.iso88591 locale charmap
ISO-8859-1
root:/etc# LC_ALL=nl_NL.iso88591 locale charmap
ISO-8859-1

This is what I chose.

root:/etc# more profile
# Begin /etc/profile
export LANG=nl_NL.ISO-8859-1@euro
# End /etc/profile

Since I have some experience with the profile file, I might add some more comments at a later time.