January 2022
Intermediate to advanced
402 pages
8h 45m
English
Content preview from Command-Line Rust
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Chapter 12. Fortunate Son
Now I laugh and make a fortune / Off the same ones that I tortured
They Might Be Giants, “Kiss Me, Son of God” (1988)
In this chapter, you will create a Rust version of the fortune program that will print a randomly selected aphorism or bit of trivia or interesting ASCII art1 from a database of text files.
The program gets its name from a fortune cookie, a crisp cookie that contains a small piece of paper printed with a short bit of text that might be a fortune like “You will take a trip soon” or maybe a short joke or saying.
When I was first learning to use a Unix terminal in my undergraduate days,2 a successful login would often include the output from fortune.
You will learn how to do the following:
-
Use the
PathandPathBufstructs to represent system paths -
Parse records of text spanning multiple lines from a file
-
Use randomness and control it with seeds
-
Use the
OsStrandOsStringtypes to represent filenames
How fortune Works
I will start by describing how fortune works so you will have an idea of what your version will need to do.
You may first need to install the program,3 as it is not often present by default on most systems.
Here’s a bit of the manual page, which you can read with man fortune:
NAME fortune - print a random, hopefully interesting, adage SYNOPSIS fortune [-acefilosuw] [-n length] [ -m pattern] [[n%] file/dir/all] DESCRIPTION When fortune is run with no arguments it prints out a random epigram. Epigrams are divided ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.