I write scripts in rust as a replacement for bash. Its really quite good at it. Aside from perl, its the only scripting language that can directly make syscalls. Its got great libraries for: parsing, configuration management, and declarative CLIs built right into it.
Sure its a little more verbose than bash one-liners, but if you need any kind of error handling and recovery, its way more effective than bash and doesn't break when you switch platforms (i.e. mac/bsd utility incompatibilities with gnu utilities).
My only complaint would be that dealing with OsString is more difficult than necessary. Way to much of the stdlib encourages programmers to just do "non-utf8 paths don't exist" and panic/ignore when encountering one. (Not a malady exclusive to rust, but I wish they'd gotten it right)
Paths are hard because they usually look like printable text, but don't have to be text. POSIX filenames are octet strings not containing 0x2F or 0x00. They aren't required to contain any "printable" characters, or even be valid text in any particular encoding. Most of the Rust stdlib you're thinking of is for handling text strings, but paths aren't text strings. Python also has the same split between Pathlib paths & all other strings.
Yeah, the issue is that there are no utilities for manipulating OsStrings, like for splitting, regex matching, or formatting OsStrings/Paths.
For instance the popular `fd` utility can't actually see files containing malformed utf-8, so you can hide files from system administrators naively using those tools by just adding invalid utf-8.
touch $'example\xff.txt'
fd 'example.*txt' // not found
fd -F $'example\xff.txt' // fails non-utf8
The existing rust libraries for manipulating OsString push people towards ignorance or rejection of non-utf8 filenames and paths.
Sure its a little more verbose than bash one-liners, but if you need any kind of error handling and recovery, its way more effective than bash and doesn't break when you switch platforms (i.e. mac/bsd utility incompatibilities with gnu utilities).
My only complaint would be that dealing with OsString is more difficult than necessary. Way to much of the stdlib encourages programmers to just do "non-utf8 paths don't exist" and panic/ignore when encountering one. (Not a malady exclusive to rust, but I wish they'd gotten it right)
Example I had handy: <https://gist.github.com/webstrand/945c738c5d60ffd7657845a654...>