Rust Programming Cookbook

How to do it...

Follow these quick steps to call on external programs:

1. Open a Terminal to create a new project using cargo new sub-processes. Use VS Code to open the project directory.
2. Open src/main.rs. Rust's standard library comes with an external command interface built-in, but first, let's import it:

use std::error::Error;use std::io::Write;use std::process::{Command, Stdio};

3. Once imported, we can do the rest in the main function. We'll start off by calling ls with some arguments in two different directories:

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error + Send + Sync + 'static>> {    let mut ls_child = Command::new("ls");    if !cfg!(target_os = "windows") {        ls_child.args(&["-alh"]);    }    println!("{}", ls_child.status()?); ls_child.current_dir("src/"); ...