Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Waiting and our simpsh project

Lets set ourselves an interesting learning exercise: a small project. We want to implement, using C on the Linux OS of course, a very simple shell of our own. Lets call it our simpsh—simple shell—project.

Note: simpsh is a very small, minimally functioning shell. It works with only single-word commands. It does not support features such as redirection, piping, shell built-ins, and so on. It's meant to be a learning exercise.

The specification, for now at least is this: Display a prompt (say >>), accept a user command at the prompt, and execute it. This is the stopping condition: if the user enters quit, terminate (similar to typing logout, exit, or Ctrl + D on an actual shell process).

It seems pretty straightforward: ...