I had to do some bulk processing of files. Ususally I would have written a Bash script or build something in Python. But this time I wanted to test how much more overhead it would be to finish the task with Rust.
The first task was extracting downloaded archives from bandcamp as a folder structure. That took some time because I had to get into the Rust file system API. The result looks good even for a first try and improving the error handling should be relatively easy.
The second task was taking flac files from my music library and converting them to MP3 so I could listen to them in my car. The additional requirement was to keep the file structure, not litter the converted files all over the library, and keep the ID3 tags on the files.
For both cases I wanted to to use unix utils for the heavy lifting to test how difficult their are to integrate in Rust.
For now the results look promising. Even without extra abstractions it's quite easy and relatively quick to write small automation tools/scripts. With some abstractions for common jobs it might get even easier. One large disadvantage is that the tool needs to be compiled. This isn't such an issue on a development system, but is a bit annoying when working on a system remotely. Since most severs don't have the Rust toolchain installed. So this makes only sense for automation tools that will be used/extended for some time. One off scripts should probably still be implemented in Bash.
Haven't decided on a license yet.