Unix™ Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency, and Threads

Chapter 11. Project: Cracking Shells

By developing a shell from the bottom up, this chapter explores the intricacies of process creation, termination, identification and the correct handling of signals. Example programs handle foreground and background processes, pipelines, process groups, sessions and controlling terminals. The chapter also looks at job control and terminal I/O. The closing project integrates these concepts by incorporating job control into a shell.

Objectives

• Learn how shells work

• Experiment with background processes

• Explore signal handling and job control

• Use redirection and pipelines

• Understand process groups and controlling terminals

Building a Simple Shell

A shell is a process that does command-line interpretation. In other words, ...