A functional Unix shell built from scratch in C, modelled after bash. This project required deep understanding of how a shell actually works under the hood — from parsing user input to managing processes and file descriptors.
What it does
- Lexing and parsing of shell commands including quotes and special characters
- Pipes — chaining commands with
| - Input/output redirections —
<,>,>>, heredoc<< - Environment variable expansion and
$?exit status - Built-in commands:
echo,cd,pwd,export,unset,env,exit - Signal handling for
Ctrl+C,Ctrl+D,Ctrl+\ - Process management with
fork,execveandwait
Tech Stack
- C — manual memory management, no leaks allowed
- POSIX system calls — fork, execve, pipe, dup2, waitpid, sigaction
- Readline library for input history and line editing