How to invoke system commands using in Rust

If you want to invoke system commands in your Rust program, you need to make use of the std::process::Command module. In this short post, i'll tell you how to use this module. For more infos on Rust you can visit the well documented Rust book

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Getting started

We wanna make sure that we import the std::process::Command module. To do that, go to your main.rs file.

use std::process::command;

fn main() {
     println!("Hello World!");
}

spawn, output and status

Before we start invoking a system command, we must distinguish between three different methods to spawn a child process and run system commands.

• spawn
• output
• status

spawn -> Executes the commands as a child process and returns a handle to it. For more information on how to interact with stdin/stdout check out this answer on stack overflow.

output -> Runs the command as a child process and waits until the command finishes, then collects the output. If you want to print out the output of a command in real time, please refer to the spawn method.

status -> Runs a command as a child process and waits for it to finish and collect its status.

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How to structure a command

We will use the command ls as an example

use std::process:Command;

fn main(){
   Command::new("ls")
           .arg("-a")
           .spawn()
           .expect("failed to execute command");
}

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For more examples visit the offical docs

I hope I could help you and you like my post.

Comments

[XenonPydev]

Just what I was looking for. However, inspecting the first code block:

use std::process::command;

should be

use std::process::Command;