Homework 1: shell

This assignment will make you more familiar with the Unix system call interface and the shell by implementing several features in a small shell, which we will refer to as the 143A shell. You can do this assignment on any operating system that supports the Unix API (a Linux openlab.ics.uci.edu machine, your laptop with Linux or MacOS, etc.). Submit your 143A shell to the Class Dropbox (143A HW 1: Shell) see instructions at the bottom of this page.

Read Chapter 0 of the xv6 book.

If you are not familiar with what a shell does, do the Unix hands-on from 6.033 class at MIT (this is optional and will not be graded in 143A).

Download the 143A shell, and look it over. The 143A shell contains two main parts: parsing shell commands and implementing them. The parser recognizes only simple shell commands such as the following:

ls > y
cat < y | sort | uniq | wc > y1
cat y1
rm y1
ls |  sort | uniq | wc
rm y

To compile sh.c, you need a C compiler, such as gcc. On openlab.ics.uci.edu, you can compile the skeleton shell as follows:

$ gcc sh.c

$ ./a.out < t.sh

Executing simple commands

Implement simple commands, such as:

$ ls

The parser already builds an execcmd for you, so the only code you have to write is for the ' ' case in runcmd. You might find it useful to look at the manual page for exec; type "man 3 exec", and read about execv. Print an error message when exec fails.

To test your program, compile and run the resulting a.out:

143A$./a.out

143A$ ls

Your shell may print an error message (unless there is a program named ls in your working directory or you are using a version of exec that searches PATH). Now type to your shell:

143A$ /bin/ls

This should execute the program /bin/ls, which should print out the file names in your working directory. You can stop the 143A shell by typing ctrl-d, which should put you back in your computer's shell.

You may want to change the 143A shell to always try /bin, if the program doesn't exist in the current working directory, so that below you don't have to type "/bin" for each program. If you are ambitious you can implement support for a PATH variable.

I/O redirection

Implement I/O redirection commands so that you can run:

echo "143A is cool" > x.txt
cat < x.txt

The parser already recognizes ">" and "<", and builds a redircmd for you, so your job is just filling out the missing code in runcmd for those symbols. You might find the man pages for open and close useful.

Note that the mode field in redircmd contains access modes (e.g., O_RDONLY), which you should pass in the flags argument to open; see parseredirs for the mode values that the shell is using and the manual page for open for the flags argument.

Make sure you print an error message if one of the system calls you are using fails.

Make sure your implementation runs correctly with the above test input. A common error is to forget to specify the permission with which the file must be created (i.e., the 3rd argument to open).

Implement pipes

Implement pipes so that you can run command pipelines such as:

$ ls | sort | uniq | wc

The parser already recognizes "|", and builds a pipecmd for you, so the only code you must write is for the '|' case in runcmd. You might find the man pages for pipe, fork, close, and dup useful.

Test that you can run the above pipeline. The sort program may be in the directory /usr/bin/ and in that case you can type the absolute pathname /usr/bin/sort to run sort. (In your computer's shell you can type which sort to find out which directory in the shell's search path has an executable named "sort".)

Now you should be able to run the following command correctly:

143A$ a.out < t.sh

Make sure you use the right absolute pathnames for the programs.

Don't forget to submit your solution to the Class Dropbox (143A HW 1: Shell) (as a source file "sh.c"). If you decide to submit a challenge exercise submit a source file "sh-extra.c" and a shell script "extra.sh" that contains an example extra command that your shell can handle. Please write me a comment at the top of "sh-extra.c" explaining which extra features you decided to handle.

Challenge exercises (extra 20%)

You can add any feature of your choice to your shell. But, you may want to consider the following as a start:

• Implement lists of commands, separated by ";"
• Implement sub shells by implementing "(" and ")"
• Implement running commands in the background by supporting "&" and "wait"