Question

I’m writing a simple shell in C and I want to implement the user input the same way the other shells do, or at least how bash does (never used others). If you enter a command with random whitespace then it can still run the command:

ex.

           ls                              -1

Obviously strtok() wont work on this when separating the command and args…

How does bash do this? Should I search through the thousands of lines of the source code?

Answer 1

You can skip spaces while you’re parsing your command:

while(*p==' '||*p=='\t') ++p;