minishell

Overview

minishell is a miniature shell written in C. It supports parsing, environment variables, pipes and redirections, built-in commands, and robust signal handling.

Highlights

• Tokenizer + parser producing an AST
• Pipes and redirections with proper FD management
• Built-ins: cd, echo, env, export, unset, pwd, exit
• Signal handling for interactive UX (SIGINT, SIGQUIT)

Technical Details

• Exec module forks and orchestrates pipelines
• Careful error propagation and exit statuses
• Memory arenas and cleanup after each command
• Tested against common edge cases (quotes, escapes)

Challenges

• Designing a clean grammar and AST
• Deadlock and FD leak avoidance
• Signal interactions across parent/child

What I Learned

• Unix process model and IPC
• Practical parsing strategies
• Shell ergonomics and error UX