I'm reading through "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment". My dislike of C caused me to learn Rust and port some of the examples and exercises from C to Rust.

Beware: this is my first Rust project. This code is far from beautiful and might have mistakes (e.g. dangling pointers). PR are very welcome. All code is tested on OS X and most on it also on Linux.

Progress

• Chapter 1: Overview
• Chapter 2: UNIX Standardization and Implementations
• Chapter 3: File I/O
• Chapter 4: Files and Directories
• Chapter 5: Standard I/O Library
• Chapter 6: System Data Files and Information
• Chapter 7: Process Environment
• Chapter 8: Process Control
• Chapter 9: Process Relationships
• Chapter 10: Signals
• Chapter 11: Threads
• Chapter 12: Thread control

Using this code

TODO:

• can you copy-paste this code for your project? Mostly, yes, but some examples are probably optimal because they copy data (e.g. buffers) even when unneeded.
• explain some basic usage cstr!, to_option() and working with buffers allocated via vectors.

Building

• Building should work out of the box for Macos and Linux on rust nightly.
• Some of the binaries only do something on Macos, others only for Linux (see #cfg switches in the main methods)
• If you regularly switch between building MacOs and Linux you can tell cargo to put those files in different directories using export CARGO_TARGET_DIR=target/linux

Code not ported to Rust:

• Figure 7.9, 7.11, 7.13: setjmp, longjmp: of course Rust solves this with exception handling (i.e. with explicit error handling or using panic::catch_unwind). These sections (as well as the one about malloc, etc.) are actually very good reasons why to not use C directly but instead turn to something safer like Rust. In addition to that: Rust doesn't offer a way to safe unwind the stack after a longjump: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/force-cleanup-before-longjmp/3376
• Figure 7.14: That's exactly why you take Rust over C because Rust will complain at compile time that you cannot return a stack variable from a function.
• Figure 8.13: avoid race condition: the synchronization features in Rust don't allow syncing of forks (only available for threads, see e.g. BurntSushi/chan-signal#13), so I skipped this Figure, maybe coming back to this later (when signals are discussed in later chapters)
• Figure 10.8, 10.9, 10.11, 10.20: rust does not have setjmp/longjmp