Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed the basics of processes in Unix-like operating systems. We learned how to spawn a child process, interact with its standard input and standard output, and execute a command with its arguments. We also saw how to set and clear environment variables. We looked at the various ways to terminate a process on error conditions, and how to detect and handle external signals. We finally wrote a shell program in Rust that can execute the standard Unix commands, but also accept a couple of commands in a natural-language format. We also handled a set of errors to make the program more robust.

Continuing on the topic of managing system resources, in the next chapter, we will learn how to manage threads of a process and build concurrent systems programs in Rust.