Recreating a simplified Bash shell - 42 School project

About · Features · Usage · Author

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About 💡

Minishell is a 42 School project that aims to recreate a simplified Bash shell, handling commands, pipes, redirections, environment variables and built-in commands, with proper signal and memory management.

This project focuses on learning Unix process management, input parsing, file descriptors, and the design of a minimal shell that behaves similarly to Bash in its core functionality.

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Features 🚀

Minishell implements:

• A custom prompt waiting for user input
• Command execution via absolute/relative path or $PATH
• History using the readline library
• Input parsing with support for:
  • Quoting: ' and " (with correct expansion behavior)
  • Escaped characters inside quotes
  • Variable expansion ($VAR, $?)
• Built-in commands:
  • echo, cd, pwd, export, unset, env, exit
• Redirections:
  • > : output redirection
  • >>: output append
  • < : input redirection
  • <<: heredoc (with optional variable expansion)
• Pipe support (|)
• Proper signal handling:
  • Ctrl-C → display new prompt
  • Ctrl-D → exit shell
  • Ctrl-\ → ignored
• Only one global variable used to store the signal number (as per subject constraints)
• No support for bonus features like &&, ||, (), or wildcards

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Usage 📘

Requirements

• GCC compiler
• Make

Instructions

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/TiagoDev88/minishell.git

2. Compile

make

3. Run

./minishell

• Then enter commands as you would in a typical Bash session:

minishell$ echo Hello, world!
Hello, world!

Author 👤

42 login: tfilipe- / GitHub: @TiagoDev88

42 login: edfreder / GitHub: @EdgarFir