🐚 ShellCraft – Build Your Own Command Line

Developed by Team "Kernel Conquerers" during the Kernel Quest Hackathon.

ShellCraft is an intelligent, cross-platform command-line interpreter (shell) built to bridge the gap between low-level system programming and modern user experience. While traditional shells often obscure process control and command execution flow, ShellCraft illuminates them with smart features like real-time autocorrect and dynamic autocompletion.

🚀 Key Features

• *️⃣ Intelligent Autocomplete: Powered by prompt-toolkit, ShellCraft scans your system's PATH and local directories to provide real-time command and file suggestions via the Tab key.

• *️⃣ Smart Autocorrect: Uses a custom typo-tolerance algorithm to detect and execute the intended command even if you make a mistake (e.g., ehoh becomes echo).

• *️⃣ Cross-Platform Compatibility: Designed to be platform-agnostic, running seamlessly on Windows (PowerShell/CMD), macOS, and Linux.

• *️⃣ Advanced Process Control: Supports standard Unix-style features including:

• I/O Redirection: Use > to save output to a file or < to read input from one.

• Pipes (|): Chain multiple commands together to create powerful data pipelines.

• *️⃣ Dynamic Contextual Prompt: The prompt automatically updates to show your current working directory, ensuring you always know where you are in the filesystem.

---

🏗️ Technical Architecture

ShellCraft is built on a robust Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) architecture. It treats the shell as a "General Contractor" for the operating system, delegating tasks to external binaries while managing the environment internally.

Core Components:

1. The Parser: Uses shlex to handle complex shell-like syntax, ensuring that quotes, spaces, and special characters are tokenized safely.
2. The Executor: Leverages the subprocess module to manage process lifecycles.

• On Unix/macOS, it executes binaries directly.
• On Windows, it intelligently invokes the shell environment (shell=True) to handle built-in commands like echo and dir.

3. Built-in Logic: Certain commands (like cd and exit) are handled within the parent process to ensure environment state (like the Current Working Directory) persists correctly.

---

🛠️ Installation & Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.9+
• Dependencies:

pip install prompt-toolkit

Running the Shell

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/your-repo/ShellCraft.git
cd ShellCraft/project

2. Start the application:

python ShellCraft.py

---

🏆 Hackathon Journey: Kernel Quest

ShellCraft was developed through a high-pressure, two-round evaluation process:

• Round 1: We established the core REPL loop, process management, and the shlex parsing logic. We successfully passed the 3:00 PM evaluation to move to the finals.
• Round 2: We integrated the "Intelligence Layer," implementing the ShellCompleter class and smoothing out the autocorrect logic to ensure a "forgiving" user environment.

---

👥 The Team: Kernel Conquerers

• S Hrishikesh - Core Logic & Process Management
• Vishal Narayan - Autocomplete & Autocorrect Implementation
• Graceson B - System Integration & Architecture

---