Crate pathsearch

This crate provides functions that can be used to search for an executable based on the PATH environment on both POSIX and Windows systems.

find_executable_in_path is the most convenient function exported by this crate; given the name of an executable, it will yield the absolute path of the first matching file.

use pathsearch::find_executable_in_path;

if let Some(exe) = find_executable_in_path("ls") {
  println!("Found ls at {}", exe.display());
}

PathSearcher is platform-independent struct that encompasses the path searching algorithm used by find_executable_in_path. Construct it by passing in the PATH and PATHEXT (for Windows) environment variables and iterate it to incrementally produce all candidate results. This is useful when implementing utilities such as which that want to show all possible paths.

use pathsearch::PathSearcher;
use std::ffi::OsString;

let path = std::env::var_os("PATH");
let path_ext = std::env::var_os("PATHEXT");

for exe in PathSearcher::new(
    "zsh",
    path.as_ref().map(OsString::as_os_str),
    path_ext.as_ref().map(OsString::as_os_str),
) {
    println!("{}", exe.display());
}

SimplePathSearcher is a simple iterator that can be used to search an arbitrary path for an arbitrary file that doesn't have to be executable.

Modules

unix

Structs

SimplePathSearcher

SimplePathSearcher is an iterator that yields candidate PathBuf inthstances generated from searching the supplied path string following the standard rules: explode path by the system path separator character and then for each entry, concatenate the candidate command and test whether that is a file.

Functions

find_executable_in_path

Resolves the first matching candidate command from the current process environment using the platform appropriate rules. On Unix systems this will search the PATH environment variable for an executable file. On Windows systems this will search each entry in PATH and return the first file that has an extension listed in the PATHEXT environment variable.

Type Definitions

PathSearcher