Talk:Creating A Shell

Consider either deleting this page or improving it

Firstly, I want to say that this article is not of the best quality: both technically and stylistically. Specifically, it's not using any proper interpreter techniques, it doesn't even tokenize the input. The "empty" command just looks like a joke, a single space will break its usefulness. I don't understand why such a primitive shell should be described in an article on a wiki about one of the most difficult and complex programming tasks.

On the other hand, a proper article is probably out of place, maybe it would better fit something like a compiler development wiki.

Finally, I see three options: deleting it, moving it to the author's personal wiki page and completely rewriting it with proper practices. What do people think?

--Roman 16:51, 9 July 2016 (CDT)

RE: Consider either deleting this page or improving it

This article indeed looks like a very simple stub whose code is more than simple. Such simple code is self-explanatory if someone has basic knowledge of programming. We should either remove it or completely rewrite the article; Former, because it has not use at all. When someone will have the passion to rewrite it, he could explain what a shell does (and don't) in detail (which is absent in this one) and come up with either writing a command line interpreter from scratch or relying on libraries for scripting languages. This is problby closely connected to 'how to port libraries'. -- Techel 19:34 (CET) 11 July '16

New draft

I've drafted a new version of this page. Maybe someone more familiar with typical ways of reading strings and handling child processes would like to fill in some of the implementation details?

I've tried to make the article as applicable as possible to different kinds of operating systems - maybe I've done too much of this? Should it be more specific to UNIX-like systems?

Onlyonemac 03:21, 12 July 2016 (CDT)