Minishell

Minishell is a 42 school project that recreates a simplified Unix shell in C.
It supports command parsing, pipes, redirections, environment variable expansion, and common built-in commands.

Features

• Prompt display and command history.
• Parsing of commands, quotes, pipes, and redirections.
• Environment variable expansion, including $?.
• Built-in commands:
  • echo
  • cd
  • pwd
  • export
  • unset
  • env
  • exit
• Execution of external commands using the system PATH.
• Input/output redirections and heredoc handling.

Key learning objectives:

• Lexical analysis and parsing
• Process creation and execve
• File descriptor manipulation
• Signal handling (SIGINT, SIGQUIT)
• Memory management without leaks

Build

make

Run

./minishell

Notes

This project focuses on process management, file descriptors, signal handling, and shell behavior.
Its behavior is designed to stay close to bash where required by the project rules.

$ ./minishell
minishell$ echo "Hello World"
Hello World
minishell$ echo $?
0
minishell$ ls -la | grep Makefile | wc -l
1
minishell$ cat << EOF > test.txt
> line1
> line2
> EOF
minishell$ cat test.txt
line1
line2
minishell$ exit

Signals

• Ctrl+C (SIGINT) → sends SIGINT to active process
• Ctrl+D → exit shell

Authors

• jqrsound
• derealthink