Rust is a systems programming language that aims to provide memory safety, concurrency, and performance. It is an excellent choice for building command-line tools and utilities, making it a natural fit for implementing coreutils, the collection of basic file, shell, and text manipulation tools found on Unix-like systems.
In this article, we will explore how to create coreutils in Rust, focusing on a few examples to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the language.
Table of contents
- Introduction to coreutils
- Setting up a Rust project
- Implementing
cat - Implementing
wc - Implementing
ls - Conclusion
Introduction to coreutils
Coreutils is a package that contains many essential Unix command-line utilities, such as ls, cat, rm, cp, and mv. These utilities are fundamental to working with Unix-like systems and help users perform simple tasks like listing directories, concatenating files, and deleting files.
In this article, we will implement three coreutils in Rust:
cat: concatenate files and print on the standard outputwc: print newline, word, and byte counts for each file
