With rabbits, a common myth is that if you touch a baby rabbit the mother will no longer care for it. 9 times out of 10, the mother will return to care for the babies after they have been handled.
QNX is not a Linux distribution, normal or otherwise. QNX is POSIX compliant. That means that much of the programming interface and many of the utilities are the same. The underlying OS is very different in structure. There is little compatibility for drivers. With Linux the operating system functions as a very large monolithic piece of code.
The most commonly used shells are SH(Bourne SHell) CSH(C SHell) and KSH(Korn SHell), most of the other shells you encounter will be variants of these shells and will share the same syntax, KSH is based on SH and so is BASH(Bourne again shell). TCSH(Extended C SHell) is based on CSH. The various shells all have built in functions which allow for the creation of shell scripts, that is, the stringing together of shell commands and constructs to automate what can be automated in order to make life easier for the user.