minishell

🐚 As beautiful as a shell.

About

minishell is a core project in the 42 curriculum that challenges students to recreate a simplified version of the Unix shell. The goal is to handle user input, parse commands, manage environment variables, and execute processes with proper redirections and piping.

🎯 Main Objectives

• Reproduce basic shell behavior (bash, sh)
• Implement a lexer and parser for shell syntax
• Handle quotes, variable expansion ($VAR), and tilde expansion (~)
• Manage pipes (|), redirections (>, <, >>, <<)
• Support built-in commands (cd, echo, export, etc.)
• Manage signals (e.g., Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D)
• Ensure memory safety and leak-free execution

🛠️ Skills Gained

• Low-level system programming with fork, execve, pipe, dup2, wait
• Lexical analysis and parsing techniques
• Process and file descriptor management
• Signal handling and terminal control
• Modular, clean, and maintainable C code under strict 42 norms

minishell builds a solid foundation for understanding how shells and operating systems work at a deeper level — preparing students for more complex projects.

References

• https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux (to understand how some system calls work)
• https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/ (mimic some behaviors from bash 5.1.16)

Install & Usage (MacOS/Linux)

Prerequisites

minishell requires the GNU Readline library for command line editing and history.

apt install libreadline-dev # for deb based distros
dnf install readline-devel # for rpm based distros
brew install readline # for macOS

Installation

1. Clone the repository recursively to include the libft submodule:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/KutayKoray/kutish.git

2. Build the project:

make

Usage

Run the shell:

./minishell

or run with debug mode to see more verbose output:

./minishell -d

Ta-da! 🥳
You now have a working shell that can execute commands, handle pipes, and manage redirections.