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basename and dirname in Rust

I recently did some minor file name munging in Rust, and was reminded that one of the hard parts about learning a new language is the differences in vocabulary.

In UNIX, there are two command line tools, basename and dirname. They take a pathname as an argument and print a modified pathname to stdout, which is really handy for shell scripts. Several other languages copied that naming convention, and so I was really surprised to find that googling for rust dirname didn’t return anything useful1.

Here’s a usage example: Say you have a pathname /etc/ssh/sshd.config, if you use dirname on it, that prints /etc/ssh and basename prints sshd.config. Ruby, python, go all follow a similar pattern (ok, go calls its functions Dir and Base). Rust does not - it calls them something else2.

In Rust, the functions live under the Path struct and are called parent (the dirname equivalent), and file_name (the basename equivalent).

These names make sense! They’re just way outside the range of vocabulary I’m used to.


  1. Maybe now that this post is published, it will! ↩︎

  2. Rust used to have functions under these names, up until late 2014-early 2015, but then the “Path reform” happened, which normalized the API a great deal and renamed a bunch of functions. ↩︎