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Day 1: What does a shell even do?

 3 years ago
source link: https://jvns.ca/blog/2013/09/30/hacker-school-day-2-what-does-a-shell-even-do/
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Day 1: What does a shell even do?

• hackerschool •


So I’m working on writing a shell in C a little bit. Before yesterday, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what writing a shell even meant. Here are some things that your shell has to do! I’m sure there are some Important Things missing.

  • Parse what you type in to figure out which are the commands and which are the arguments (ls -la LICENSE)
  • expand ls * into ls file1 file2 file3 ...
  • Pipes! If you write ls | grep blah, it needs to send the output from ls into grep. And redirection too.
  • Signal handling! If you press Ctrl+C, it needs to send that signal to whatever process you’re running. Or something. I don’t really understand this yet.
  • Process management! Lets you background and foreground jobs. (Ctrl+z and fg and bg)
  • Shell scripting! (for loops and things)

And a thing the shell doesn’t have to do:

  • Figure out which command to execute using the $PATH environment variable. exec does that, apparently.

I think I’m going to work on implementing pipes & redirection & signal handling.


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