🐚 Minishell

A small Unix shell written in C, inspired by Bash, developed as a team project at 42 Heilbronn.

The goal was to recreate core shell functionality while working directly with Unix processes, file descriptors, pipes, signals, and system calls.

✨ Features

• Command execution
• Pipes (|)
• Redirections (<, >, >>, <<)
• Environment variables & $?
• Single & double quotes
• Built-ins: echo, cd, pwd, export, unset, env, exit
• Signal handling
• Process & file descriptor management

🏗️ Architecture

We divided the project into two clearly defined parts:

User Input
    │
    ▼
┌──────────┐
│  Parser  │  ← Project Partner
└────┬─────┘
     │
     ▼
Parsed Commands
     │
     ▼
┌───────────┐
│ Execution │  ← Paula
└─────┬─────┘
      │
      ▼
Processes / Pipes / Redirections

This separation made development efficient and easy to coordinate. With a clear interface between parsing and execution, we could work in parallel, test our components independently, and isolate bugs more easily.

⚙️ My Contribution — Execution

I focused on the execution layer, including:

• Process creation with fork()
• Command execution with execve()
• $PATH resolution
• Pipes & file descriptors
• Input/output redirections
• Here-documents
• Built-in execution
• Process synchronization with waitpid()
• Exit status handling
• Signals & error handling

🔧 Compilation & Usage

Clone the repository and compile:

git clone <repository-url>
cd minishell
make

Run the shell:

./minishell

Make commands

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

Example

$ echo "Hello, Minishell!"
Hello, Minishell!

$ ls | grep ".c" | wc -l
5

$ export NAME=Paula
$ echo "Hello $NAME"
Hello Paula

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