0x16. C - Simple Shell

Concepts

For this project, students are expected to look at this concepts:

• Everything you need to know to start coding your own shell
• Approaching a Project

Background Context

Write a simple UNIX command interpreter.

Resources

Read or watch:

• Unix shell
• Thompson shell
• Ken Thompson
• Everything you need to know to start coding your own shell concept page

man or help:

• sh (Run sh as well)

Learning Objectives

At the end of this project, you are expected to be able to explain to anyone, without the help of Google:

General

• Who designed and implemented the original Unix operating system
• Who wrote the first version of the UNIX shell
• Who invented the B programming language(the direct predecessor to the C programming language)
• Who is Ken Thompson
• How does a shell work
• What is a pid and a ppid
• How to manipulate the environment of the current process
• What is thte difference between the function and a system call
• How to create processes
• What are the three prototypes of main
• How does shell use the PATH to find the programs
• How to execute another program with the execve system call
• How to suspend the execution of a process until one of its children terminates
• What is EOF / "end-of-file"?

Requirements

General

• Allowed editors: vi, vim, emacs
• All your files will be compiled on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using gcc, using the options -Wall -Werror -Wextra -pedantic -std=gnu89
• All your files should end on a new line
• A README.md file, at the root of the folder of the project is mandatory
• Your code should use the Betty style. It will be checked using the betty-style.pl and betty-doc.pl
• Your code should not have any memory leaks
• No more than 5 functions per file
• All your header files should be include guarded
• Use system calls only when you need to (why?)
• Write a README with the description of your project
• You should have an AUTHORS file at the root of your repository, listing all individuals having contributed content to the repository. Format, see Docker

GitHub

*There should be one project repository per group. If you and your partner have a repository with the same name in both your accounts, you risk a 0% score. Add your partner as a collaborator.*

More Info

Output

• Unless specified otherwise, your program must have the exact same output as sh (/bin/sh) as well as the exact same error output.
• The only difference is when you print an error, the name of the program must be equivalent to your argv[0] (See below)

Example of error with sh:

$ echo "qwerty" | /bin/sh
/bin/sh: 1: qwerty: not found
$ echo "qwerty" | /bin/../bin/sh
/bin/../bin/sh: 1: qwerty: not found
$

same error output with your program hsh:

$ echo "qwerty" | ./hsh
./hsh: 1: qwerty: not found
$ echo "qwerty" | ./././hsh
./././hsh: 1: qwerty: not found
$

List of allowed functions and system calls

• access (man 2 access)
• chdir (man 2 chdir)
• close (man 2 close)
• closedir (man 3 closedir)
• execve (man 2 execve)
• exit (man 3 exit)
• _exit (man 2 _exit)
• fflush (man 3 fflush)
• fork (man 2 fork)
• free (man 3 free)
• getcwd (man 3 getcwd)
• getline (man 3 getline)
• getpid (man 2 getpid)
• isatty (man 3 isatty)
• kill (man 2 kill)
• malloc (man 3 malloc)
• open (man 2 open)
• opendir (man 3 opendir)
• perror (man 3 perror)
• read (man 2 read)
• readdir (man 3 readdir)
• signal (man 2 signal)
• stat (__xstat)(man 2 stat)
• lstat (__lxstat)(man 2 lstat)
• fstat (__fxstat)(man 2 fstat)
• strtok (man 3 strtok)
• wait (man 2 wait)
• waitpid (man 2 waitpid)
• wait3 (man 2 wait3)
• wait4 (man 2 wait4)
• write (man 2 write)

Compilation

Your shell will be compiled this way:

gcc -Wall -Werror -pedantic -std=gnu89 *.c -o hsh

Testing

Your shell should work like this in interactive mode:

$ ./hsh
($) /bin/ls
hsh main.c shell.c
($)
($) exit
$

But also in non-nteractive mode:

$ echo "/bin/ls" | ./hsh
hsh main.c shell.c test_ls_2
$
$ cat test_ls_2
/bin/ls
/bin/ls
$
$ cat test_ls_2 | ./hsh
hsh main.c shell.c test_ls_2
hsh main.c shell.c test_ls_2
$