Rust offers various ways to interact with the operating system, depending on your needs. For most common OS interactions, the standard library (std⮳) will be sufficient. For system information, use sysinfo⮳. For very specific or platform-dependent OS features, you might need to use system calls or FFI.
std::fs provides the core functionality for working with files and directories (opening, reading, writing, creating, deleting, etc.). std::path provides types and functions for working with file paths (Path, PathBuf). fs_extra⮳ is a crate that provides additional file system operations. Use tempfile⮳ for creating temporary files and directories.
Process Management
Use std::process for spawning and managing child processes.
Environment Variables
Use std::env for accessing and manipulating environment variables.
Networking
std::net provides basic networking functionality (TCP, UDP). tokio⮳ is a powerful asynchronous runtime, essential for high-performance networking applications.
Threading
Use std::thread for creating and managing threads.
Date and time
Use std::time⮳ for working with time and durations. chrono⮳ is widely used crate for date and time calculations. time⮳ is a newer crate for date and time.
Operating System Information
Use sysinfo⮳ to retrieve system information (CPU, memory, etc.).
Low-level OS interaction or access to specific OS features
Use system calls directly (via std::os::unix or std::os::windows) or FFI. std::os::unix provides access to Unix-specific system calls. std::os::windows provides access to Windows-specific system calls.
Foreign Function Interface (FFI)
Rust's FFI allows you to call functions written in other languages (e.g., C) that might interact with the OS directly. This is often used when you need to access OS features that aren't directly exposed by Rust's standard library or other crates.
Random Number Generation
rand⮳ is a popular random number generator crate, which can in turn call the OS.
