Crate io_mux

A Mux provides a single receive end and multiple send ends. Data sent to any of the send ends comes out the receive end, in order, tagged by the sender.

Each send end works as a file descriptor. For instance, with io-mux you can collect stdout and stderr from a process, and highlight any error output from stderr, while preserving the relative order of data across both stdout and stderr.

Example

let mut mux = io_mux::Mux::new()?;

let mut child = std::process::Command::new("sh")
    .arg("-c")
    .arg("echo out1 && echo err1 1>&2 && echo out2")
    .stdout(mux.make_untagged_sender()?)
    .stderr(mux.make_tagged_sender("e")?)
    .spawn()?;

let mut done_sender = mux.make_tagged_sender("d")?;
std::thread::spawn(move || match child.wait() {
    Ok(status) if status.success() => {
        let _ = write!(done_sender, "Done\n");
    }
    Ok(status) => {
        let _ = write!(done_sender, "Child process failed\n");
    }
    Err(e) => {
        let _ = write!(done_sender, "Error: {:?}\n", e);
    }
});

loop {
    let tagged_data = mux.read()?;
    if let Some(tag) = tagged_data.tag {
        print!("{}: ", tag);
        if tag == "d" {
            break;
        }
    }
    std::io::stdout().write_all(tagged_data.data)?;
}

async

If you enable the async feature, io-mux additionally provides an AsyncMux type, which allows processing data asynchronously.

You may want to use this with async-process or async-pidfd to concurrently wait on the exit of a process and the muxed output and error of that process. Until the process exits, call AsyncMux::read() to get the next bit of output, awaiting that concurrently with the exit of the process. Once the process exits and will thus produce no further output, call AsyncMux::read_nonblock until it returns None to drain the remaining output out of the mux.

Internals

Internally, Mux creates a UNIX datagram socket for the receive end, and a separate UNIX datagram socket for each sender. Datagram sockets support recvfrom, which provides the address of the sender, so Mux::read can use the sender address as the tag for the packet received.

However, datagram sockets require reading an entire datagram with each recvfrom call, so Mux::read needs to find out the size of the next datagram before calling recvfrom. Linux supports directly asking for the next packet size using recv with MSG_PEEK | MSG_TRUNC. On other UNIX systems, we have to repeatedly call recv with MSG_PEEK and an increasingly large buffer, until we receive the entire packet, then make one more call without MSG_PEEK to tell the OS to discard it.

Mux creates UNIX sockets within a temporary directory, removed when dropping the Mux.

Note that Mux::read cannot provide any indication of end-of-file. When using Mux, you will need to have some other indication that no further output will arrive, such as the exit of the child process producing output.

Portability

Mux can theoretically run on any UNIX system. However, on some non-Linux systems, when the buffers for a UNIX socket fill up, witing to the UNIX socket may return an ENOBUFS error rather than blocking. Thus, on non-Linux systems, the process writing to a MuxSender may encounter an error if the receiving process does not process its buffers quickly enough. This does not match the behavior of a pipe. As this may result in surprising behavior, by default io-mux does not compile on non-Linux systems. If you want to use io-mux on a non-Linux system, and your use case does not need the same semantics as a pipe, and in particular it will not cause a problem in your use case if writing to a MuxSender may produce an ENOBUFS error if you do not read from the receive end quickly enough, then you can compile io-mux on non-Linux platforms by enabling the experimental-unix-support feature of io-mux.

If you have another UNIX platform which blocks on writes to a UNIX datagram socket with full buffers, as Linux does, then please send a note to the io-mux maintainer to mark support for your platform as non-experimental.

Structs

Mux	A Mux provides a single receive end and multiple send ends. Data sent to any of the send ends comes out the receive end, in order, tagged by the sender.
MuxSender	A send end of a Mux. You can convert a MuxSender to a std::process::Stdio for use with a child process, obtain the underlying file descriptor using IntoRawFd, or send data using std::io::Write.
TaggedData	Data received through a mux, along with the tag if any.