Minishell:

It's a core part of the 42 curriculum that involves creating a simplified UNIX shell, helping students deepen their understanding of process management, parsing, signals, and environment variables in C. The Minishell project that developed in C, is a simplified shell that emulates basic behavior of bash. It's designed to deepen understanding of:

• Processes and file descriptors
• Parsing complex input (e.g., quotes, pipes, redirections)
• Environment variables and their expansion
• Signal handling
• Built-in commands implementation

Features

• Prompt display and command line input
• Lexical analysis and parsing
• Word splitting and quote removal
• Environment variable expansion ($VAR)
• Redirections: >, >>, <, <<
• Pipes (|)
• Built-in commands:
  • echo
  • cd
  • pwd
  • export
  • unset
  • env
  • exit
• Signal handling (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D, Ctrl+\)
• Exit codes per POSIX standards
• Error handling and cleanup

Technical Details

• Language: C
• Tools: readline, termios, POSIX APIs
• Platform: Unix/Linux (macOS and Linux compliant)

Learning Goals

Understand how shells work under the hood

Practice managing processes and signals

Implement a tokenizer and parser

Handle memory management manually

Learn to structure a medium-scale C project

Installation

git clone https://github.com/shahnajsc/42minishell.git
cd minishell
make

Usage

./minishell
minishell$ echo "Hello, World!"
Hello, World!

minishell$ ls -l | grep .c > files.txt

Contributors

Shahnaj

Hager

Project Status

Submission and peer evaluation is done. Secured 101%