This project was created as part of the 42 curriculum by adduarte.

Minishell

Description

Minishell is a minimal Unix shell implementation written in C, inspired by core Bash behavior. The main goal of this project is to practice fundamental operating system and low-level programming concepts such as:

• process creation and management (fork, execve/execvp, wait);
• redirections and pipes;
• input parsing with quote handling and variable expansion;
• environment management (envp);
• interactive signal handling.

In short, this project reproduces the core shell cycle: read, parse, and execute commands, with support for builtins and external commands.

Instructions

Build

From the repository root, run:

make

Useful maintenance commands:

make clean
make fclean
make re

Run

After building:

./minishell

Usage Examples

echo "hello"
export USER_TEST=42
echo $USER_TEST
ls -la | grep minishell
cat < infile > outfile

Resources

Technical References

• Bash Reference Manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/
• POSIX Shell Command Language: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
• Linux man pages:
  • readline, signal, fork, execve, wait, pipe, dup2, open, close
• 42 Minishell subject and official project documentation.

AI Usage in This Project

AI was used as a support tool for specific engineering and documentation tasks, without replacing conceptual understanding:

• reviewing and reorganizing code structure (module separation);
• assisting with refactors to improve readability and maintainability;
• helping validate compile issues and diagnose regressions;
• supporting the writing and formatting of this README.md.

Project Structure

.
├── include/
├── src/
│   ├── core/
│   ├── parsing/
│   ├── execution/
│   ├── builtins/
│   ├── env/
│   ├── utils/
│   └── libft/
├── minishell.h
└── Makefile