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Machine Problem 1

This document outlines two programming projects related to creating a basic UNIX shell interface in C. The first part involves modifying a shell outline to fork a child process that executes commands entered by the user. The child process would use execvp() to run the command, passing the parsed command and arguments. The second part adds a history feature to the shell.

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mecaren
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273 views

Machine Problem 1

This document outlines two programming projects related to creating a basic UNIX shell interface in C. The first part involves modifying a shell outline to fork a child process that executes commands entered by the user. The child process would use execvp() to run the command, passing the parsed command and arguments. The second part adds a history feature to the shell.

Uploaded by

mecaren
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Programming Projects

157

copied and the name of the copied file. The program will then create
an ordinary pipe and write the contents of the file to be copied to the
pipe. The child process will read this file from the pipe and write it to
the destination file. For example, if we invoke the program as follows:

filecopy input.txt copy.txt


the file input.txt will be written to the pipe. The child process will
read the contents of this file and write it to the destination file copy.txt.
You may write this program using either UNIX or Windows pipes.

Programming Projects
Project 1 UNIX Shell and History Feature
This project consists of designing a C program to serve as a shell interface
that accepts user commands and then executes each command in a separate
process. This project can be completed on any Linux, UNIX, or Mac OS X system.
A shell interface gives the user a prompt, after which the next command
is entered. The example below illustrates the prompt osh> and the users
next command: cat prog.c. (This command displays the file prog.c on the
terminal using the UNIX cat command.)

osh> cat prog.c


One technique for implementing a shell interface is to have the parent process
first read what the user enters on the command line (in this case, cat
prog.c), and then create a separate child process that performs the command.
Unless otherwise specified, the parent process waits for the child to exit
before continuing. This is similar in functionality to the new process creation
illustrated in Figure 3.10. However, UNIX shells typically also allow the child
process to run in the background, or concurrently. To accomplish this, we add
an ampersand (&) at the end of the command. Thus, if we rewrite the above
command as

osh> cat prog.c &


the parent and child processes will run concurrently.
The separate child process is created using the fork() system call, and the
users command is executed using one of the system calls in the exec() family
(as described in Section 3.3.1).
A C program that provides the general operations of a command-line shell
is supplied in Figure 3.36. The main() function presents the prompt osh->
and outlines the steps to be taken after input from the user has been read. The
main() function continually loops as long as should run equals 1; when the
user enters exit at the prompt, your program will set should run to 0 and
terminate.
This project is organized into two parts: (1) creating the child process and
executing the command in the child, and (2) modifying the shell to allow a
history feature.

158

Chapter 3 Processes

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#define MAX LINE 80 /* The maximum length command */
int main(void)
{
char *args[MAX LINE/2 + 1]; /* command line arguments */
int should run = 1; /* flag to determine when to exit program */
while (should run) {
printf("osh>");
fflush(stdout);
/**
* After reading user input, the steps are:
* (1) fork a child process using fork()
* (2) the child process will invoke execvp()
* (3) if command included &, parent will invoke wait()
*/
}
return 0;
}
Figure 3.36 Outline of simple shell.

Part I Creating a Child Process


The first task is to modify the main() function in Figure 3.36 so that a child
process is forked and executes the command specified by the user. This will
require parsing what the user has entered into separate tokens and storing the
tokens in an array of character strings (args in Figure 3.36). For example, if the
user enters the command ps -ael at the osh> prompt, the values stored in the
args array are:

args[0] = "ps"
args[1] = "-ael"
args[2] = NULL
This args array will be passed to the execvp() function, which has the
following prototype:

execvp(char *command, char *params[]);


Here, command represents the command to be performed and params stores the
parameters to this command. For this project, the execvp() function should
be invoked as execvp(args[0], args). Be sure to check whether the user
included an & to determine whether or not the parent process is to wait for the
child to exit.

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