ninep :: a simple 9p protocol implementation

9P is a network protocol developed at Bell Labs for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs distributed operating system as the means of accessing and manipulating resources and applications transparently in a distributed environment. 9P works both as a distributed file system and as a network transparent and language agnostic ‘API’.

The section 5 man pages from plan 9 cover the protocol.

A simple demo

The examples/server.rs file contains a minimal filesystem that demos the functionality provided by this crate. You can use the 9p command from https://github.com/9fans/plan9port to interact with the server and test it out.

See the 9p man page for more information on how the tool works

# Let 9p know where to find the socket we have opened
$ export NAMESPACE="/tmp/ns.$USER.$DISPLAY"

# List the contents of the filesystem and read the contents of a file
$ 9p ls ninep-server
$ 9p read ninep-server/foo

# List the contents of a subdirectory and a file in that subdirectory
$ 9p ls ninep-server/bar
$ 9p read ninep-server/bar/baz

# Read and then update the contents of a file
$ 9p read ninep-server/rw
$ echo "updated" | 9p write ninep-server/rw
$ 9p read ninep-server/rw

A non-trivial filesystem

The ad text editor provides a full virtual filesystem interface in the style of plan9's acme text editor via its fsys module.