Journal 2023-02-28

Scripting in rust

“Scripting” in rust can be consider better than bash, you can package a lot of functionalities in a single statically linked binary that is easy to distribute and use.

Rust has a lot of libraries that can be used to build a CLI application:

• clap: for parsing command line arguments
• walkdir: for walking a directory tree
• regex: for parsing text
• serde: for parsing json
• reqwest: for making http requests

There are also a lot of possibilities throw the ffi:

• libgit2: for interacting with git repositories
• libssh2: for interacting with ssh servers

Finally you can use the std::process module to spawn processes and interact with processes, or I find it more convenient to use the xshell crate. It provides a lot of functions to interact with the shell environment and piping commands. Making the scripting experience very easy,without you having to manually check the status code of each Command.