no, it is not about terminology: usually we execute commands and try to understand the result. The commands are actually files.
but from the other side some files are executable and used as commands and others are not. They are handled differently. For example /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo cannot be executed, because they are not executable, you have obviously no right to execute it. But you can read them and check their content by any command you like (cat, grep, awk, perl, python whatever).
So for example if you want to know the number of processors or check the available memory you may execute:
Code:
grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo
awk '/MemAvail/{print $2 " kB"}' /proc/meminfo