Snowshell

Minimal toy shell written in C built for fun and to expand my C/systems skills.

Compile and run

This project uses CMake, so I would highly recommend that you install it if you haven't already. It doesn't use any external libraries, so you just need a C compiler. The project was tested with both GCC and Clang.

You can run this command and it will compile the project and run it:

mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && cmake --build . --target run

A release build can be compiled using (assuming you already generated the Makefile):

cd build && cmake --build . --config Release

Shell and man pages can be installed using:

sudo ./install.sh

Then it can be uninstalled using:

sudo ./uninstall.sh

Current features

Snowshell currently supports basic things you would expect from a rudimentary shell like:

• Execute programs
• Go through directories
• Has a history of past commands
• Pipe commands together

Small demo:

$ ./snowshell 
[ /home/elliott/Documents/snowshell/build ]-> cd
[ /home/elliott ]-> mkdir test
[ /home/elliott ]-> cd test
[ /home/elliott/test ]-> nvim test.py
[ /home/elliott/test ]-> python test.py
Hello World!
[ /home/elliott/test ]-> exit

Pipe demo:

[ /home/elliott/Documents/snowshell ]-> cat README.md | tr 'a-z' 'A-Z' | head -n 4
# SNOWSHELL

SMALL AND SIMPLE SHELL MADE IN C. JUST SOMETHING I MADE FOR FUN AND 
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE LANGUAGE.

Future improvements

I think the shell is pretty much where I'd like it to be, but here's some ideas that could be worked on:

• Better C practices and just general refactoring of the code as I get better with it
• Simple redirection (like ls -l > output.txt) could be fun
• Adding the '&&' command