minishell

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Introduction

This project is a core part of the 42 school curriculum. The goal of minishell is to create a simple, functional shell, similar to bash or zsh. This project teaches fundamental concepts of process management, command execution, and environment handling.

The shell should be able to:

• Display a prompt and wait for user input.
• Execute external commands and programs.
• Handle a variety of built-in commands.
• Manage environment variables.
• Support command redirection (<, >).
• Support command pipes (|).

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How It Works

The minishell program operates in a continuous loop:

1. Read: The program reads a command line entered by the user from standard input.
2. Parse: The command line is tokenized and parsed into a command and its arguments. This stage handles special characters like pipes, redirections, and quotes.
3. Execute: Based on the parsed command, the program takes action:
   • If the command is a built-in (e.g., cd, echo, export), the shell's own functions are called.
   • If it's an external command, the shell forks a new process, and the child process uses execve to execute the command. The parent process waits for the child to finish.
4. Loop: After the command is executed, the program frees all allocated memory and returns to the read stage, displaying the prompt again.

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Built-in Commands

• echo with option -n
• cd with only a relative or absolute path
• pwd
• export
• unset
• env
• exit

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Installation and Usage

To compile and run minishell, you will need a Makefile.

Compilation

You can compile your program using the provided Makefile.

make

Running the Program

Once compiled, you can run the executable from your terminal.

./minishell

Example Usage

$ ls -l
$ echo "Hello, World!" > file.txt
$ cat file.txt
$ env | grep PATH

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Project Contributor

• Ruben Finnerud - rubenfin
• Jack de Haan - rubenfin

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