These utilities are a small subset of common Unix utilities written in the Rust programming language. The project was undertaken as an exercise in order to gain some proficiency in Rust: nevertheless feel free to use and share this code freely so long as the LICENSE notice is retained.
Each utility resides inside it's own subdirectory and can be built
independently. To build a single utility, cd to the corresponding
subdirectory and issue the standard make && make install, adjusting
paths as needed using the following variables:
- PREFIX: defaults to splitting between / and /usr
- BINDIR: defaults to $PREFIX/bin and $PREFIX/sbin
- MANDIR: defaults to $PREFIX/share/man
- PROGNAME: can be adjusted to a different name, for coexistance with the standard suite of utilities.
Alternatively, you can build the entire distribution from the top-level
directory with make && make install, adjusting paths as above.
Alternative to the alternative, each utility can be built with cargo build, which is what the Makefiles do internally.
bin:
- echo
- head
- hostname
- sleep
usr.bin:
- base32
- base64
- basename
- dirname
- factor
- fold
- nproc
- rev
- readlink
- wc
- yes
The included utilities strive for POSIX comformance and display the expected behavior. However, some extensions have been implemented in the hope of improving consistency accross utilities.
As an example, both base32 and base64 will process multiple files and print an identifying header for each one, identical to the behavior of the head utility. This behavior can be suppressed with the "-q" or "--quiet" flag.
Rust is comparable to C in the control it gives the programmer to manage memory directly, while giving added peace of mind that memory and concurrency safety are baked right in to the language at compile time. Generally if the Rust compiler compiles the code, entire classes of common bugs and security issues that are common in C and C++ are not going to be present.
Additionally, Rust crates give a rich ecosystem for adding functionality, and often a problem that would be solved with dozens of lines of code can be solved in Rust just by including an external crate and calling the appropriate functions. While linking to third-party libraries is an option in C, documentation is often lacking and portability concerns may preclude the practice.
There are a number of implementations of Unix base utilities available, and there is already uutils/coreutils as a Rust implementation. This project was undertaken primarily as an exercise to gain some experience actually using Rust in real-world programming. However, there are a few things that I consider lacking in the other implementations in one way or another.
- uutils/coreutils is designed to be cross platform, leading to some code bloat and tradeoffs in implementation details. RsUtils by contrast targets Posix-ey systems only, and aims for correctness and light weight.
- uutils uses quite a bit of shared code between utilities and by default builds a single multi-call binary. RsUtils are all completely standalone, allowing one to pick and choose what gets installed.
- Certain implementation details are non-standard in uutils/coreutils, such as mkdir, which according to Posix should accept all forms of mode argument that chmod accepts, but which only accepts permission modes in octal format.
- Written in C, not Rust. While it is completely possible to write good code in C, Rust enforces good code by default in respect to memory safety and concurrency.
- Also written in C.
- Extremely bloated codebase for what you get.
- The autotools build system is needlessly complex with a 77,874 line configure script and a 17K plus line Makefile. To build tiny little cli utilities that can be implemented in a single file of source code. I do not consider this to be good practice.
- The GNU folks are kind of nutty zealots, and the licensing comes with strings attached.
- This was the only option other than Busybox for years on Linux, and options are good.
- Primarily targets embedded systems
- Extremely complex multi-call binary with a correspondingly large attack surface, goes against the Unix way of "do one thing and do it well".
- For complete functionality of all applets, must be install suid.
- Another fairly complex build system, although not as complex as the GNU system.