This project has been created as part of the 42 curriculum by omaestre, fda-roch.

Description

Minishell is a simplified Unix shell written in C, with the goal of replicating core features of Bash. The main objective of this project is to understand how shells work by implementing command parsing, and execution. The program handles user input in an interactive prompt, interprets commands, and executes them while using essential shell functionalities such as pipes, redirections, environment variable management, built-in commands and signals.

Instructions

Compilation:

To compile the project, run the following commands:

make        # Compile the project
make clean  # Remove object files
make fclean # Remove object files and executable
make re     # Recompile everything

Execution:

Launch the shell with: ./minishell

• Execution of binaries and system commands
• Built-in commands (cd, echo, pwd, export, unset, env, exit)
• Pipes (|)
• Input and output redirections (<, >, >>)
• Environment variable expansion ($VAR)
• Signal handling (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+\)
• Error handling and exit status management

Resources

We used mainly our project manual available in intra, but we also read other useful resources like:

• Bash manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/
• Linux man pages (for specific functions, like man dup2, map fork, etc.)
• Graphic representation of the steps to take into account: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1269608787526815167/minishell-execution-part
• For pipes: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/574260/how-does-pipe-work-in-bash-commands
• Handling file descriptors: https://www.codequoi.com/en/handling-a-file-by-its-descriptor-in-c/
• The Linux Programming Interface (https://man7.org/tlpi/)

AI Usage

AI tools were used as a support resource during the development of this project. Specifically, they were used for:

• Helping with function naming, and correcting grammatical errors

• Obtaining examples to test our code and perform stress tests.

All implementation decisions, code development, and final debugging were carried out by us.