📖 Minishell

Description

Minishell is a recreation of bash, designed to help you understand how command-line interpreters work. With this shell, you can execute commands, handle piping (|), redirection (>), and environment variable management, mimicking the behavior of Bash. Additionally, it supports handling signals, handling exit commands, and more, making it a small but powerful shell.

This project provides a hands-on way to explore how a shell processes input, interprets commands, interacts with the operating system, and executes system calls.

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Features

• Command Execution: Execute basic commands such as ls, echo, cat, and more.
• Pipes (|): Connect multiple commands via pipes to pass the output of one command as input to the next.
• Redirection (>, >>, <): Redirect input and output between files and commands.
• Environment Variables: Set and get environment variables like $PATH, $USER, etc.
• Signals: Handle signals like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-D gracefully.
• Customizable Prompt: Customize the shell prompt and the appearance of the shell.
• History: Track and access previously run commands (optional feature, depending on your implementation).
• Exit Command: Exit the shell with the exit command.

Compile and Run

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone <repository_url>
cd 42_minishell

2. To compile the program, simply run:

make

3. To run the program:

./minishell

Controls

Simply type a command and press Enter to execute it. Use Ctrl-C to interrupt the running command (handled gracefully in Minishell). Use Ctrl-D to exit the shell (end of input).

Example commands:

ls – List directory contents echo "Hello World" – Print the string Hello World to the terminal cat file.txt – Display contents of a file exit – Exit the shell

./minishell
minishell$ echo "Hello, World!"
> Hello, World!
minishell$ ls
> Documents  Downloads  Minishell  Pictures
minishell$ cat file.txt
> This is the content of file.txt.
minishell$ exit