Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

Chapter 6: Working with Files and Directories in Rust

In the previous chapter, we looked at the details of how Rust uses memory, a key system resource.

In this chapter, we will look at how Rust interacts with another important class of system resources – files and directories. The Rust Standard Library offers a rich set of abstractions that enable platform-independent file and directory operations.

For this chapter, we will review the basics of how files are managed by Unix/Linux, and master the key APIs that the Rust Standard Library provides to deal with files, paths, links, and directories.

Using the Rust Standard Library, we will implement a shell command, rstat, that counts the total number of lines of Rust code in a directory (and its ...