A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text. A script which sets up the environment, runs the program, and does any necessary cleanup or logging, is called a wrapper.

The term is also used more generally to mean the automated mode of running an operating system shell; each operating system uses a particular name for these functions including batch files (MSDos-Win95 stream, OS/2), command procedures (VMS), and shell scripts (Windows NT stream and third-party derivatives like Take Command/4NT—article is at cmd.exe), and mainframe operating systems are associated with a number of terms.

All Unix-like systems include at least one POSIX shell (typically either bash or the zsh compatibility mode), while many also include a modern shell like fish or nushell.

Comments are ignored by the shell. They typically begin with the hash symbol (#), and continue until the end of the line.

The shebang, or hash-bang, is a special kind of comment which the system uses to determine what interpreter to use to execute the file. The shebang consists of the characters "#!". In Unix-like operating systems, the characters following the "#!" prefix are interpreted as a path to an executable program that will interpret the script.

A shell script can provide a convenient variation of a system command where special environment settings, command options, or post-processing apply automatically, but in a way that allows the new script to still act as a fully normal Unix command.

One example would be to create a version of ls, the command to list files, giving it a shorter command name of l, which would be normally saved in a user's bin directory as /home/username/bin/l, and a default set of command options pre-supplied.

Here, the first line uses a shebang to indicate which interpreter should execute the rest of the script, and the second line makes a listing with options for file format indicators, columns, all files (none omitted), and a size in blocks. The LC_COLLATE=C sets the default collation order to not fold upper and lower case together, not intermix dotfiles with normal filenames as a side effect of ignoring punctuation in the names (dotfiles are usually only shown if an option like -a is used), and the "$@" causes any parameters given to l to pass through as parameters to ls, so that all of the normal options and other syntax known to ls can still be used.