unix-exec-output-catcher

A library written in Rust that executes an executable in a child process and catches its output (stdout and stderr).

⚠️ This is mainly educational. Rust std lib covers this already. 🚨

Thanks to a reddit user who told me that Rusts standard library already covers this. I was not aware of it. Therefore I recommend to use the standard library but use this as educational resource how it could be done - in case you're interested. :) std/process/struct.Command.html#method.output

TL;DR;

The call to fork_exec_and_catch() is blocking. If the program produces infinite output to stdout or stderr, this function will never return. If the program produces 1GB of output this function will consume 1GB of memory. See examples directory for example code.

Example

use unix_exec_output_catcher::fork_exec_and_catch;

fn main() {
    // executes "ls" with "-la" as argument.
    // this is equivalent to running "$ ls -la" in your shell.
    // The line by line output is stored inside the result.
    let res = fork_exec_and_catch("ls", vec!["ls", "-la"]);
    println!("{:#?}", res.unwrap());
}

Used technologies / important keywords

• Unix (including but not limited to Linux-distributions, MacOS)
• pipe()
• exec()
• fork()
• dup2()