Crate cmd_lib[−][src]
Rust command-line library
Common rust command-line macros and utilities, to write shell-script like tasks easily in rust programming language. Available at crates.io.
Why you need this
If you need to run some external commands in rust, the std::process::Command is a good abstraction layer on top of different OS syscalls. It provides fine-grained control over how a new process should be spawned, and it allows you to wait for process to finish and check the exit status or collect all of its output. However, when Redirection or Piping is needed, you need to set up the parent and child IO handles manually, like this in the rust cookbook, which is often a tedious work.
A lot of developers just choose shell(sh, bash, …) scripts for such tasks, by using <
to redirect input,
>
to redirect output and ‘|’ to pipe outputs. In my experience, this is the only good parts of shell script.
You can find all kinds of pitfalls and mysterious tricks to make other parts of shell script work. As the shell
scripts grow, they will ultimately be unmaintainable and no one wants to touch them any more.
This cmd_lib library is trying to provide the redirection and piping capabilities, and other facilities to make writing shell-script like tasks easily without launching any shell. For the rust cookbook examples, they can usually be implemented as one line of rust macro with the help of this library, as in the examples/rust_cookbook_external.rs. Since they are rust code, you can always rewrite them in rust natively in the future, if necessary without spawning external commands.
What this library provides
Macros to run external commands
-
run_cmd! –> CmdResult
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; let msg = "I love rust"; run_cmd!(echo $msg).unwrap(); run_cmd!(echo "This is the message: $msg").unwrap(); // pipe commands are also supported run_cmd!(du -ah . | sort -hr | head -n 10).unwrap(); // or a group of commands // if any command fails, just return Err(...) let file = "/tmp/f"; let keyword = "rust"; if run_cmd! { cat ${file} | grep ${keyword}; echo "bad cmd" >&2; ls /nofile || true; date; ls oops; cat oops; }.is_err() { // your error handling code }
-
run_fun! –> FunResult
use cmd_lib::run_fun; let version = run_fun!(rustc --version).unwrap(); eprintln!("Your rust version is {}", version); // with pipes let n = run_fun!(echo "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" | wc -w).unwrap(); eprintln!("There are {} words in above sentence", n);
Intuitive parameters passing
When passing parameters to run_cmd!
and run_fun!
macros, if they are not part to rust
String literals, they will be
converted to string as an atomic component, so you don’t need to quote them. The parameters will be
like $a or ${a} in run_cmd!
or run_fun!
macros.
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; let dir = "my folder"; run_cmd!(echo "Creating $dir at /tmp").unwrap(); run_cmd!(mkdir -p /tmp/$dir).unwrap(); // or with group commands: let dir = "my folder"; run_cmd!(echo "Creating $dir at /tmp"; mkdir -p /tmp/$dir).unwrap();
You can consider “” as glue, so everything inside the quotes will be treated as a single atomic component.
If they are part of Raw string literals,
there will be no string interpolation, the same as in idiomatic rust. However, you can always use format!
macro
to form the new string. For example:
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; // string interpolation let key_word = "time"; let awk_opts = format!(r#"/{}/ {{print $(NF-3) " " $(NF-1) " " $NF}}"#, key_word); run_cmd!(ping -c 10 www.google.com | awk $awk_opts).unwrap();
If you want to use dynamic parameters, you can use $[] to access vector variable:
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; let gopts = vec![vec!["-l", "-a", "/"], vec!["-a", "/var"]]; for opts in gopts { run_cmd!(ls $[opts]).unwrap(); }
Redirection and Piping
Right now piping and stdin, stdout, stderr redirection are supported. Most parts are the same as in bash scripts. See examples at examples/redirect.rs
Macros to define, get and set global variables
proc_var!
to define thread local global variableproc_var_get!
to get the valueproc_var_set!
to set the value
use cmd_lib::{ proc_var, proc_var_get, proc_var_set }; proc_var!(DELAY, f64, 1.0); const DELAY_FACTOR: f64 = 0.8; proc_var_set!(DELAY, |d| *d *= DELAY_FACTOR); let d = proc_var_get!(DELAY); // check more examples in examples/tetris.rs
Builtin commands
cd
cd: set process current directory
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; run_cmd! ( cd /tmp; ls | wc -l; ).unwrap();
Notice that builtin cd
will only change with current scope
and it will restore the previous current directory when it
exits the scope.
Use std::env::set_current_dir
if you want to change the current
working directory for the whole program.
Macros to register your own commands
Declare your function with export_cmd
attribute:
use cmd_lib::{export_cmd, CmdArgs, CmdEnvs, FunResult}; #[export_cmd(my_cmd)] fn foo(args: CmdArgs, _envs: CmdEnvs) -> FunResult { println!("msg from foo(), args: {:?}", args); Ok("bar".into()) }
To use it, just import it at first:
use cmd_lib::{use_cmd, run_cmd, run_fun}; use_cmd!(my_cmd); run_cmd!(my_cmd).unwrap(); println!("get result: {}", run_fun!(my_cmd).unwrap());
See examples in examples/test_export_cmds.rs
Other Notes
Environment Variables
You can use std::env::var to fetch the environment variable key from the current process. It will report error if the environment variable is not present, and it also includes other checks to avoid silent failures.
To set environment variables for the command only, you can put the assignments before the command. Like this:
use cmd_lib::run_cmd; run_cmd!(FOO=100 /tmp/test_run_cmd_lib.sh).unwrap();
Security Notes
Using macros can actually avoid command injection, since we do parsing before variable substitution. For example, below code is fine even without any quotes:
use cmd_lib::{run_cmd, CmdResult}; fn cleanup_uploaded_file(file: &str) -> CmdResult { run_cmd!(/bin/rm -f /var/upload/$file) }
It is not the case in bash, which will always do variable substitution at first.
Glob/Wildcard
This library does not provide glob functions, to avoid silent errors and other surprises. You can use the glob package instead.
Thread Safety
This library tries very hard to not set global states, so parallel cargo test
can be executed just fine.
However, the process APIs are inherently not thread-safe, as a result I sometimes need to set
RUST_TEST_THREADS=1
before running tests.
Macros
proc_var | |
proc_var_get | |
proc_var_set | |
run_cmd | |
run_fun | |
use_cmd |
Type Definitions
CmdArgs | |
CmdEnvs | |
CmdResult | |
FunResult |
Attribute Macros
export_cmd |