📜 Minishell

Welcome to Minishell, a simple yet powerful Unix shell. Minishell provides a command-line interface with several essential features. It's designed to be intuitive and functional for everyday use.

🌟 Key Features

• Command Execution: Minishell can execute system commands based on the PATH variable or using a relative or absolute path.

• Prompt: It displays a prompt to indicate it's ready to accept a command.

• Command History: Minishell maintains a working history of previously executed commands, allowing you to recall and re-execute them easily.

• Signal Handling: The shell handles signals efficiently, using a single global variable to indicate received signals. This approach ensures that the signal handler won't access main data structures, maintaining the integrity of your shell.

• Quoting: Minishell correctly interprets single (' ') and double (" ") quotes, preventing unwanted interpretation of metacharacters within them.

• Redirection: You can redirect input (<) and output (>) and even implement heredoc-style input (<<) to read input until a delimiter is seen (without updating the history). Append mode (>>) for output is also supported.

• Pipes: Minishell allows you to use pipes (|) to connect the output of one command to the input of the next, enabling complex command chains.

• Environment Variables: You can work with environment variables, using the "$" symbol followed by a sequence of characters to expand to their values.

• Exit Status: The shell provides access to the exit status of the most recently executed foreground pipeline using "$?".

• Interactive Mode: In interactive mode, Minishell behaves like you would expect from a shell. You can use ctrl-C to display a new prompt, ctrl-D to exit the shell, and ctrl-\ (ctrl-backslash) to do nothing.

• Built-in Commands: Minishell implements several essential built-in commands, including:

  • echo with the -n option
  • cd with relative or absolute paths
  • pwd with no options
  • export with no options
  • unset with no options
  • env with no options or arguments
  • exit with no options

🚀 Getting Started

Requirements

You need to install readline first

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libreadline-dev

Compilation

To compile and run Minishell, use the provided Makefile. Here are the basic commands:

make         # Compile Minishell
./minishell  # Run Minishell

Enjoy using Minishell! 🐚💻