Real World Haskell

Chapter 20. Systems Programming in Haskell

So far, we’ve been talking mostly about high-level concepts. Haskell can also be used for lower-level systems programming. It is quite possible to write programs that interface with the operating system at a low level using Haskell.

In this chapter, we are going to attempt something ambitious: a Perl-like “language” that is valid Haskell, implemented in pure Haskell, that makes shell scripting easy. We are going to implement piping, easy command invocation, and some simple tools to handle tasks that might otherwise be performed with grep or sed.

Specialized modules exist for different operating systems. In this chapter, we will use generic OS-independent modules as much as possible. However, we will be focusing on the POSIX environment for much of the chapter. POSIX is a standard for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, or Solaris. Windows does not support POSIX by default, but the Cygwin environment provides a POSIX compatibility layer for Windows.

Running External Programs

It is possible to invoke external commands from Haskell. To do that, we suggest using rawSystem from the System.Cmd module. This will invoke a specified program, with the specified arguments, and return the exit code from that program. You can play with it in ghci:

ghci> :module System.Cmd
ghci> rawSystem "ls" ["-l", "/usr"] Loading package old-locale-1.0.0.0 ... linking ... done. Loading package old-time-1.0.0.0 ... linking ... done. Loading package ...