Description
Program
This is the second half of your shell project. You will start with the work that you already turned
in and complete a simple, but useful shell. Input to bash consists of lines using the same grammar
as the first part of the assignment, with additions as listed below.
In this part of the project cmd is either an absolute path name or just a command name, as in:
ls /bin/ls ./a.out
If the command name, cmd, is absolute or starts with “./”, bash should run the program specified
without further processing. If the command name is not an absolute path, bash must search the
directories in the PATH environment variable to find a directory containing the command and
run the appropriate command, if found. For example, if the PATH environment variable contains:
/bin:/usr/bin:/etc
then bash should interpret the command “ls” as referring to the program “/bin/ls” and the
command “mount” as referring to the program “/etc/mount”. Note that the system call access()
may be helpful for determining if an executable file exists with a given name.
Bash will redirect the input and output of the command to the files specified on the command
line, if included. By default, of course, bash should leave the stdin, stdout, and stderr attached
to the terminal. Error checking and reporting is particularly important here.
Quotes
Our Bash program will support two forms of quoting:
• double quotes
any characters between double quotes will need to have variables expanded (see below)
• single quotes
any characters between single quotes are left uninterpreted
You’ll need to think carefully about how to handle so that you can do the variable expansion
later!
LOOPS
Our Bash will support simple looping constructs just as in the regular shell:
while commandlist
do
commandlist (can be on several lines)
done
for VAR in str1 str2 str3 …
do
commandlist (can be on several lines)
done
New Tokens
You will need to add the following reserved tokens to your scanner:
for while in do done All of these tokens are used for the looping constructs that we will implement and are now reserved words in our shell
semicolon A semicolon (;) works the same as an EOLN token (in the parser), but it doesn’t
advance the line number counter
Shell Variables
Bash assignments are of the form
varname=value
There can be no spaces either before or after the equals sign. Value may, however, be a quoted
string of any of the three forms above. Legal variable names must start with an upper or lower
case letter and may consist only of upper and lower case letters, digits, and the underscore.
References to variables are of two forms as given below, and references to undefined variables
must result in NULL strings.
STRA=”this is a test of my”
STRB=program
echo $STRB
echo ${STRA} ${STRB}
to which the output would be
program
this is a test of my program
Three of the variables, PATH, PROMPT, and DEBUG, have meaning to your shell. Their initial values
should be read from the environment of the shell and any changes should immediately go back
into the process environment. Changing PATH MUST change the shell’s search PATH immediately
and changing PROMPT must change the prompt that the shell uses and install PROMPT into the
environment.
PROMPT=”Yes Boss> ”
PATH=”/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin”
Finally, the command
export varname
should cause the variable varname to become part of the environment of your shell. Any further
changes to varname must also be propogated into the shell’s environment, which is inherited by
its children.
Builtin Commands
Our Bash will support the following built-in commands:
cd
change directory to the value of the HOME envariable
cd directory
change directory to directory
Debugging
Shell-level debugging is enabled when the value of the envariable DEBUG is non-NULL, and disabled
when it is NULL.
bash> DEBUG=yes
bash> echo “this is a test” > /tmp/junk
Debug: program name: “/bin/echo”
Debug: argv[0]: “echo”
Debug: argv[1]: “this is a test”
Debug: stdin: (undirected)
Debug: stderr: (undirected)
Debug: stdout: “/tmp/junk”
this is a test
bash> DEBUG=’’
bash> echo “now debugging is off”
now debugging is off
Note that when debugging in enabled, you must still execute the commands in addition to
printing information about them. You may add any other code to the debugging output that
you wish. I only require that there be some debugging output present. The more use you make
of this feature, the easier time you will have in debugging your program.
Word Expansion
As part of the variable expansion, you will need to perform the following expansions on WORDs
(in your main program, not in lex or yacc):
$VAR or ${VAR}
variable expansion
${name#pattern}, ${name##pattern}
remove the pattern from the beginning of the variable’s value before returning it. These
should work as in the regular shell except that our pattern can only be a fixed string (no
wildcarding is needed).
$name%pattern, $name%%pattern same as the $name#pattern rule, but at the END of the
string.
Note that none of these expansions will occur if the original WORD appeared in single quotes!
Requirements
1. Your program must locate commands using the PATH envariable and run them.
2. Your program must support the input and output redirection from the first part of the shell.
3. Your program should generate a prompt, as given by the PROMPT envariable.
4. Your program must work for any reasonable number of arguments and must give meaningful
error messages.
5. Your shell should terminate neatly and quietly when it reaches the end of file.
6. Your shell must issue a prompt before reading input.
7. Your shell must wait() for all of its children.
Hints
You may find the following Unix system calls and library routines helpful:
access(), chdir(), fork(), execv(), dup(), dup2(), getenv(), putenv(), perror(), and
index()
Implement the features in the following order:
1. run commands with absolute path names (trivial)
2. add stdin/stdout/stderr redirection (simple – use class examples)
3. use PATH to find commands
4. implement variable assignment
5. implement variable substitution
6. implement the looping constructs
You should budget you time and priorities to allow a day or two to implement each
of those tasks over the 2 weeks that you have to finish the project. If you start right
away and allow a couple of hours to work on the project on most days, it’s quite
feasible to finish the project in plenty of time.
DO NOT MODIFY YOUR ORIGINAL PATH, MAKE A COPY OF IT!!!
ANY ASSIGNMENT SUBMITTED THAT USES AUTOMATIC PATH SEARCHING (like execve(), execle(), etc) WILL RECEIVE ZERO CREDIT
Check the return values for all system calls, it’s always worth the extra effort!!!
The syntax of the assignment statement is a little difficult to deal with, so you’ll want to think
carefully before starting.
Expanding variables in strings is difficult and neither Lex nor YACC will be much help. When
you get to that part, you should write a good variable expansion function that takes a string and
returns a new string with all variables expanded.
For the looping constructs, you’ll probably need to make a new data structure that holds an
entire construct, rather than just a single command. Then, for loops, yacc will return an entire
SET of commands using that data structure.
Extra Credit Ideas
For those of you who want to further explore the project, and want to earn at most an additional
20% on the project, I suggest that you try to make your shell more fully-functional, perhaps using
the following ideas:
Implement pipes
They aren’t hard, but will take a while to debug. If you do NOT implement them, then
any construct that uses them should generate an error in doline(). IMPLEMENTING
PIPES IS REQUIRED FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
history
Add history to bash. Use whatever syntax you want, but you might want to stick with bash’s
simple mechanism. You might look into the GNU project’s readline library here:
https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/rlman 2.html
aliasing
Add aliasing to bash by using the command “alias [match replacement]”, as in
alias ls “/bin/ls -F”
whatever you want
Think about what else the shell does for you and how you might make that work in bash.
The command man bash will give you hundreds of ideas.
