Reading input for shell in c

There are several things wrong with this.

1. Why in the world would you want to clear the screen in response to receiving a form feed character? That seems incredibly random.

2. If you indeed do want to clear the screen in response to that character, then presumably its job is then done. Why would you copy it to the buffer?

3. Turning more directly to your question, you appear to be trying to output an ANSI escape sequence. Not all terminals recognize those. Moreover,

4. stdout is likely to be line buffered, and the data you are writing are certain to not contain a newline. As a result, the buffer is unlikely to be flushed to the output device at that point. You could fix that by fflush()ing stdout after the printf() calls.

5. However, your second printf() is faulty, because you have not ensured that the data you have copied into the buffer are null-terminated, and the printf() format does not contain a field width that would make it stop before the end of the buffer.

Reading input for your shell, is probably better done with fgets (or getline). Then all you need do is (1) validate the pointer returned by fgets (to check EOF), (2) check the last character in the buffer to determine if it is '\n' (otherwise a short read occurred, and more characters remain to be read) and (3) remove the '\n' from the end of the buffer before using the buffer as the command.

You can accomplish all three in the same length of code you are presently using. For example you could do something like the following:

char *readcmd (char *buf, size_t max, FILE *fp)
{
    if (!buf)       /* validate buf not NULL */
        return NULL;

    char *p = NULL

    /* read input from fp, return NULL on EOF */
    if (!(p = fgets (buf, max, fp)))
        return NULL;

    /* find '\n' or nul-terminating char */
    for (; *p && *p != '\n'; p++) {}

    /* if not '\n' - short read occurred, read/discard remaining */
    if (*p != '\n')
    {
        int c;
        fprintf (stderr, "error: line too long, exceeds %zu chars.\n", max);

        /* read/discard chars reamining in buffer to '\n' */
        while ((c = fgetc (fp)) != '\n' && c != EOF) {}

        return NULL;
    }
    *p =  0;    /* overwrite '\n' with nul-terminating char */

    return buf;
}

(note: you can change how you respond to a short read to meet your own needs. If you dynamically allocate buf, you can realloc and continue reading. You can also look at using getline instead of fgets which will automatically allocate enough memory to read any line no matter how long (to the extent of available memory), but consider the potential problem with getline as well -- it will read any line no matter how long -- which when taking user input may not be what you want)

A short example showing how you might utilize the function to take input for your shell might be:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

#define MAXC 256

char *readcmd (char *buf, size_t max, FILE *fp);

int main (int argc, char **argv) {

    char buf[MAXC] = "";
    FILE *fp = argc > 1 ? fopen (argv[1], "r") : stdin;
    if (!fp) {
        fprintf (stderr, "error: file open failed '%s'.\n", argv[1]);
        return 1;
    }

    for (;;) {    /* prompt & read command until 'quit or EOF */
        printf ("> ");

        if (!readcmd (buf, MAXC, fp)) { /* EOF or short read   */
            putchar ('\n');             /* no '\n', so tidy up */
            break;
        }
        if (!strcmp (buf, "quit"))      /* 'quit' entered */
            break;

        /* handle command here */
        printf ("  execute command : '%s'\n", buf);
    }

    if (fp != stdin) fclose (fp); /* close if not reading stdin */

    return 0;
}
/* -- include readcmd definition here -- */

Which prompts the user with > for input, and limits the number of characters in a command to 256 (including the terminating char). The code exits when readcmd encounters an EOF or when too many characters are entered (a short read). It will also exit if the user enters quit.

Handling Key ScanCodes

If you want to hande key scan code such as to detect Control + l, then you must process the integer values that make up the codes. There are a number of ways to do this, but the basic approach is to generate a list of integers that make up the multi-byte scan codes on your system and then check for them in your code. This is done below by filling the 5-int scncode array with up to 5-int of the information read by fgets. You can then check the integer codes against those used by any of the Control, Shift, Alt, etc. code and the letter to determine if a know key combination was pressed.

Below Control + l (ell) provides a single integer scancode combination of 12. Upon receiving Control + l as input alone, a message is generated that ==> [ctrl + l (ell)] pressed..

char *readcmd (char *buf, size_t max, FILE *fp)
{
    if (!buf) return NULL;       /* validate buf not NULL */

    char *p = NULL;
    int scncode[5] = {0};   /* scncode and sz to trap ctrl+l */
    size_t sz = 0;

    /* read input from fp, return NULL on EOF */
    if (!(p = fgets (buf, max, fp)))
        return NULL;

    /* find '\n' or nul-terminating char, set len */
    for (; *p && *p != '\n'; p++) {}
    sz = p - buf;

    /* if not '\n' - short read occurred, read/discard remaining */
    if (*p != '\n')
    {
        int c;
        fprintf (stderr, "error: line too long, exceeds %zu chars.\n", max);

        /* read/discard chars reamining in buffer to '\n' */
        while ((c = fgetc (fp)) != '\n' && c != EOF) {}

        return NULL;
    }
    *p =  0;    /* overwrite '\n' with nul-terminating char */
    memcpy (scncode, buf, sz > 5 ? 5 : sz); /* fill scancode with buffer */

    /* check byte/multibyte char against scancode */
    if (scncode[0] == 12) fprintf (stderr, "==> [ctrl + l (ell)] pressed.\n");

    return buf;
}

Look things over and let me know if you have any questions.