How useful are shell tools in Rust

When film and series makers show hackers at work, they usually have to use the program’s source code or command line, which sometimes includes commands like ip With the right output, the result can be seen. Zealous system administrators can only laugh at this – because of course they know that nothing sinister is going on here, but tools such as ls, du Or grep Just part of the work.

Most administrators have internalized common commands to the extent that they automatically issue certain CLI commands immediately after opening a shell or establishing an SSH connection: lsTo see which files exist locally, psTo know what is running on the system, wto show the currently logged in users, and so on.

• command line tools such as ls, grep And ps Shells on Linux and Unix are part of everyday life for all administrators who manage systems. The tools are often not considered perfect, but they are so established that their use has become internalized and people have suffered losses.
• Established command line tools are being built on the basis of the Rust programming language. The tools have their own names, but essentially they function like their counterparts written in C and use largely the same parameters.
• The makers of the Rust clones hope to offer greater flexibility, better performance, and more modern and easier to maintain source code than the original versions of the tools, some of which have their roots in the 1970s.
• In practice, the community of Rust enthusiasts is divided into two factions when it comes to CLI tools: many developers want to offer independent programs as replacements for ls and the like, which are better – others advocate for a real one-to-one replacement.

Reimplementing GNU coreutils in Rust: Interview with Rust developers

However, something strange has been going on in command line land for some time now: a small group of enthusiasts are creating Rust versions of common CLI tools and replacing older tools with these new versions. The work of the modern devil, something administrators instinctively object to. Anyone who looks at the subject this way provides at least a less complex analysis of the situation.

This was a reading sample of our Heise-Plus article “Shell tools are very useful in Rust”. With a Heise Plus subscription you can read and listen to the full article.

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