A compact, modular, POSIX-like shell implemented in C, featuring tokenization, parsing, expansion, execution, builtins, and inter-process communication (pipes/redirections), with support for heredoc and signal handling.

• Modular codebase: lexer, parser/AST, expander, executor, builtins, heredoc, signals, pipex, etc.
• GNU Readline integration: interactive input, history, and line-editing.
• Full pipeline support: multi-process pipelines handled by executor/pipex.
• Redirections & heredoc: robust support for input/output redirection.
• Built-ins: cd, echo, pwd, export, unset, env, exit, etc.
• Reusable helpers: bundled libft for utilities and reduced dependencies.
• Build automation: Makefile with standard targets.
• Active development: frequent commits and improvements.

• Unix-like environment (Linux / macOS)
• C compiler (gcc / clang)
• GNU Readline development headers/libraries installed (for readline/history)
• Make

On Debian/Ubuntu you can install the readline development package with:

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev

From the repository root:

make

This will compile the project using the provided Makefile. Typical targets in this Makefile include building the executable (minishell) and cleaning object files (make clean, make fclean), though consult the Makefile for exact targets and behaviors.

Start the shell:

./minishell

Once started, you can execute standard system commands, use pipelines and redirections, and run built-in commands.

Example usage:

• Run a single command

  ls -la /tmp

• Pipelines

  cat file.txt | grep hello | wc -l

• Redirection

  echo "hello" > out.txt
  wc -c < out.txt

• Heredoc (example)

  cat << EOF
  line 1
  line 2
  EOF

Builtins

• cd, echo, pwd, export, unset, env, exit

(Exact builtin behavior is implemented in the builtins/ and exec_builtin/ directories. See those files for specific semantics and edge cases.)

• Use the shell interactively to test common flows: pipelines, redirections, heredoc, environment variable expansion, and builtin commands.
• To debug, compile with debugging symbols (edit the Makefile or add CFLAGS=-g) and run under gdb or use valgrind to check for memory issues:

make CFLAGS=-g
gdb ./minishell
valgrind --leak-check=full ./minishell