The JXTA Shell provides an interactive environment to the JXTA platform. The Shell provides basic commands to discover peers and peergroups, to join and resign from peergroups, to create pipes between peers, and to send pipe messages.

The Shell provides environment variables that permit binding symbolic names to JXTA platform objects. Environment variables allow Shell commands to exchange data. The command 'env' displays all defined environment variables in the current Shell session.

The Shell creates a JXTA InputPipe (stdin) for reading input from the keyboard, and a JXTA OutputPipe (stdout) to display information on the Shell console. All commands executed by the Shell have their initial stdin and stdout set up to the Shell's stdin and stdout pipes. The Shell also creates the environment variable stdgroup that contains the current JXTA PeerGroup in which the Shell and commands are executed.

The man command is available to list the commands available. Type man <command> to get help about a particular command.