documentation request ...

[maccatalan]

Hi.
hello everybody.

I would like to develop a shell as project for my "Software Engineering" course. However I tried to find some documentations about some special features that a shell should implement. Of course I can create a pseudo-shell : a simple application that would be launched from the shell. However I would like to do it well, in the right way.
So are there some documentation you know about what a shell should implement as interface with the system/kernel ? I tried to find some but without any success.
If this documentation was Darwin specific it would be far more interesting

Thank you all,
Pierre.

 

[scruffy]

What makes your shell 'pseudo', anyway? If you change the terminal prefs and have it launch your shell directly, rather than invoking it from within a shell, would it not work?

Really a shell doesn't do anything that special with regards to kernel interaction, it just fork()s, exec()s, and wait()s. What it does is special with regards to user interface. Things like I/O redirection to and from files, pipes and 'here' documents, job control, a scripting language, command history, special environment variables...

 

[maccatalan]

Ok, thank you

NB: what I meant by pseudo-shell was a simple application that would behave as a launcher.

In fact you answered my implicit question (maybe I should have started with that ) : "what does a shell special regarding to an other application ?" since your say it "doesn't do anything that special with regards to kernel".

Thx,
Pierre.