A Command-Line Interpreter, or Shell
Your shell should read the line from standard input (i.e., interactive mode) or a file (i.e., batch mode), parse the line with command and arguments, execute the command with arguments, and then prompt for more input (i.e., the shell prompt) when it has finished. This is what Minor 2 program should do with addition of batch processing which means just reading a batch line by line and calling the same interpretation logic.
- Batch Mode
In batch mode, your shell is started by specifying a batch file on its command line. The batch file contains the list of commands that should be executed. In batch mode, you should not display a prompt, but you should echo each line you read from the batch file back to the user before executing it. After a batch is finished the shell will exit.
- Interactive Mode
No parameters specified on command line when the shell is started. In this mode, you will display a prompt (any string of your choice) and the user of the shell will type in a command at the prompt.
You will need to use the fork() and exec() family of system calls. You may not use the system() system call as it simply invokes the system’s /bin/bash shell to do all of the work. You may assume that arguments are separated by whitespace. You do not have to deal with special characters such as ‘, “, , etc. You may assume that the command-line a user types is no longer than 512 bytes (including the ‘n’), but you should not assume that there is any restriction on the number of arguments to a given command.