os_pipe.rs

A cross-platform library for opening OS pipes.

The standard library uses pipes to read output from child processes, but it doesn't expose a way to create them directly. This crate fills that gap with the pipe function. It also includes some utilities for passing pipes to std::process::Command API.

The main motivation for this crate is to provide pipes for the higher level duct crate. If your main use case for pipes is to talk to child processes, duct can handle all of the details for you.

Example

// Join the stdout and stderr of a child process into a single
// stream, and read it. We do this by opening a pipe, duping its
// write end, using passing those write ends as the stdout and
// stderr of the child. We then read from the read end of the pipe,
// though we have to be careful to close the write ends by dropping
// the Command object that's holding them, or else `read_to_end`
// will block forever.

use os_pipe::{pipe, Pair, stdio_from_file};
use std::io::prelude::*;
use std::process::Command;

let Pair{mut read, write} = pipe().unwrap();
let write_copy = write.try_clone().unwrap();
let mut child = Command::new("echo");
child.arg("foo");
child.stdout(stdio_from_file(write));
child.stderr(stdio_from_file(write_copy));
let mut handle = child.spawn().unwrap();
drop(child);
let mut stdout_and_stderr = Vec::new();
read.read_to_end(&mut stdout_and_stderr).unwrap();
handle.wait().unwrap();