Minishell

A simplified Bash-like shell written in C as a 42 Lisboa project.

About • Features • Installation • Usage

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About

Minishell is a collaborative project from 42 Lisboa that involves creating a simple, yet functional, Unix shell. This project is a deep dive into process creation, synchronization, and input/output management, reinforcing core systems programming concepts.

The shell handles command execution, environment variables, signals, and built-in commands, providing a hands-on understanding of how tools like Bash or Zsh work under the hood.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Process creation and management using fork(), execve(), and waitpid().
• Input parsing, tokenization, and handling of quoting and escaping.
• Redirections (>, >>, <, <<) and pipes (|).
• Signal handling (e.g., Ctrl-C, Ctrl-D, Ctrl-\).
• Environment variable expansion ($VAR).

Features

Category	Implemented Features
Command Execution	Executes commands found in the PATH (e.g., ls, grep, cat).
Built-ins	echo, cd, pwd, export, unset, env, exit.
Redirections	Input (<), Output (>), Append (>>), Heredoc (<<).
Pipes	Multiple pipes in a single command line (e.g., ls │ grep .c │ cat -e).
Variables	Expands $USER and $? (exit status of the last command).
Quotes & Escapes	Handles single quotes ' ', double quotes " ", and the backslash \.
Signals	Ctrl-C displays a new prompt, Ctrl-D exits the shell, Ctrl-\ does nothing.

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/duarteagostinho/minishell.git
   cd minishell

2. Compile the program

   make

   This will generate the minishell executable.

Usage

Run the shell by executing the generated binary:

./minishell