Surprising to see this article. I am a CS student, and at the second year, in OS course in one the assigment, we are actually building Shell in C. Very simplistic one. Great to read.
Oregon State by any chance? It was a super cool exercise. I'd like to revisit it someday without a time crunch and build another.
Maybe not. I attended Florida Atlantic University and that was a project I did. The shell wasn't that much, just run commands, support redirection and pipes, and (I think) handle environment variables (for example, "ls $HOME").