pathctl

Oftentimes when I write install scripts i have to go looking for a path and its presence to avoid duplication, parsing the .bashrc and .profile scripts .

This is tedious, and prone to issues.

If we could have a basic utility that already took care of this as a default item in the system, it would be handy.

The code is conveyed to you under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It remains open-source itself, but does not require any project including it to be open source.

Learning project

Based on the quick python scirpt I wrote as an idea: https://gist.github.com/taikedz/4cda9e4650ad10fe827c1224816e0269

This is predominantly a learning project. I am at the beginning of my journey in rust, so this code is likely to be pretty janky, and potentially over-experimental.

Building this project

You probably want to check the basics in The Book but in summary

• With rust and cargo installed (sudo apt install cargo usually will do it)
  • or rustup from snap: sudo snap install rustup --classic && rustup toolchain install stable && exec bash
• run cargo build
• execute with ./target/debug/pathctl

This should be a fully finalized copy of the program, as set out by the specification below.

In the Cargo.toml I explicitly chose to strip the debug symbols form the build - this reduces the file's size from 12MB to 400K . An impressive difference...

Next steps

Look into unit testing libraries and practices.

Requirements

I had set myself out a set of requirements to keep me focused:

• the program binary is called pathctl
• ~/.PATH file contains user's paths, one per line. Lines may be empty. Lines starting with '#' are comments and are to be skipped
• command must take the argument load to print a path-notation of paths, each separated by colon ':'
• command must take the arguments add DIR_PATH which will add the path to the end of ~/.PATH
• command may take the argument version which will print the version string alone
• any other argument form causes help to be printed, and exits with error code
• any error should cause print out of error message, without printing stack traces or other debugging noise