One of the things that’s harder than it should be in Emacs is embedded shells. You can type Meta+x shell and sort of have a shell. Except it doesn’t work very well. There are other options but it can be really confusing for the n00b or even a semi-experienced user not familiar with invoking shells from Emacs.
Derek Taylor has a video that explains and compares Emacs shells. He—rightly in my opinion—rejects the shell and ansi-term command as basically unusable for non-trivial commands. Until fairly recently there wasn’t a good solution if you wanted a traditional shell.
As Taylor says, that has recently been remedied by the introduction of vterm. It requires the relatively new module system but solves most of the problems for those who want to have a “normal” Unix shell. It solves all the problems with shell and ansi-term and lets you run a full-function shell from within Emacs.
But that’s not all, of course. There’s also eshell. It’s both less and more than a Unix shell. Some things don’t work as well but eshell has capabilities well beyond those of traditional shells. Taylor demonstrates some—but not all—of those capabilities. There are others that he doesn’t demonstrate.
The video is 17 minutes, 20 seconds long—a bit shorter if you skip the shoutouts at the end—so you’ll have to schedule some time. If you’ve been confused by Emacs shells, take a look at Taylor’s video. It’s a good summary.