Minishell

A minimal Bash-like shell written in C (42 School project) featuring parsing, builtins, pipes, redirections, environment management, and signals.

Overview

Minishell is a command-line interpreter designed to replicate core behaviors of bash. It focuses on understanding how a shell works internally:

• lexing + parsing user input into commands and arguments
• expanding environment variables
• executing builtins and external programs
• handling pipes (|) and redirections (<, >, >>, <<)
• managing processes (fork, execve, waitpid)
• handling interactive signals (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-\, Ctrl-D)

Repository: otelliq/Minishell
Default branch: main

Features

• Builtins (directory minishell/builtins/): commonly echo, cd, pwd, export, unset, env, exit
• Pipelines: cmd1 | cmd2 | cmd3
• Redirections:
  • input: < file
  • output: > file
  • append: >> file
  • heredoc: << LIMITER
• Environment handling (env.c, env_utils.c)
• Signal handling (signals.c) for interactive behavior
• Custom memory utilities (e.g., ft_malloc.*) and custom libft/

Screenshots

No screenshots provided yet.

Suggested screenshots:

• prompt + a pipeline example
• heredoc usage
• export / env variable expansion example

Installation & setup

Prerequisites

• make
• C compiler (cc / clang / gcc)
• A UNIX-like OS (Linux/macOS)

Build

From the repository root:

make -C minishell

This should produce the minishell executable (depending on Makefile rules).

Usage

Run the shell:

./minishell/minishell

Example commands to try:

echo hello
export NAME=world
echo $NAME
ls -la | wc -l
cat < input.txt | grep foo > out.txt

Project structure

.
├── README.md
└── minishell/
    ├── Makefile
    ├── minishell.c
    ├── minishell.h
    ├── builtins/
    ├── lexer/
    ├── Parsing_system/
    ├── execve/
    ├── libft/
    ├── env*.c
    ├── fork.c
    ├── redirections*.c
    ├── signals.c
    ├── syntax_error.c
    └── utils*.c

Notes

• If this project uses readline, make sure your environment links it properly (Linux/macOS differ).
• Behavior aims to match bash for the supported subset, but it is not a full POSIX shell.

License

No license file is currently included in this repository.

If you want this to be reusable beyond the academic context, consider adding a LICENSE file (MIT/Apache-2.0 are common choices) and updating this section accordingly.