Newbie Question - What is actually executing the binary?

[snodx at hotmail.com]

Hi list,

I am a newbie here (totally new to Information Technology) you could 
say.

I have studied a bit about Linux, but I am not getting the awnser to
this question, infact you could say that all the keyword combinations
I have tried so far in Google are not yielding any results.

Here is the question, any thing that I type on Redhat's command terminal,
where is the command terminal actually sending it to? For eg if I
type say "ls -l" what is actually executing the "ls" binary in the
back-end? Which is the software program that is opening the "ls"
binary executable file, traversing through the binary instructions
in this file, understanding it and executing it?

What I am getting out of Linux books is that there is a shell which is
interacting with the user and there is the kernel which is actually
executing the instructions but I want to know more. Which kernel
program is recieving the instructions from the shell?

Sorry for this dumb question. I did'nt where else to post it.

SNODX