Interactive Terminal

[ericomeehan]

Terminal Applications

Applications such as Python, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL come with an interactive terminal interface that allows real-time processing of commands one after another. Since these shell interfaces are so common and useful, it would be useful to add a generic one to the library.

Generic Terminal

The result would be a terminal function that takes argc and argv from main and passes them off to a user-defined interpreter. Since the command syntax and resulting actions are unknown to the generic function, the purpose of the function is to switch between two activation conditions:

1. Launching with no arguments:

> $ ./application

This should open an interactive shell where the user may enter repeated commands to pass to the interpreter.

2. Launching with arguments:

> $ ./application arg1 arg2

This should simply pass the two arguments to the interpreter and close.

Data Pipes

While designing a terminal application, it is important to remember that commands may come from data pipes rather than direct user input. A robust implementation of an interactive terminal should be capable of receiving input through a pipe rather than user input.

[ericomeehan]

A basic terminal function and interfaces sub-library have been added.

[ericomeehan]

A tokenizer has been created to convert stdin strings to an argv-like array. Currently, the design is to simply build an array of pointers by traversing the original string, converting spaces into null characters, and placing the next memory address in the array.

At the moment, I believe it is the source of a segmentation fault.