File Search Utility in Rust

This is the first lab exercise in my CS 155 (Compiler Construction) class. We were tasked to create a Cargo-based Rust program that takes in a glob path and a regex string as command line arguments and outputs a lexicographically sorted list of filepaths with content matching the given regex string.

I created two implementations for this lab exercise:

1. Imperative way
   • For this, I used loops and vectors to traverse the directory tree
   • If the content of the file matches with the given regex string, push it to an initialized vector vec
   • Then print all the elements that are contained in vec/
2. Functional Way
   • I used built-in Rust functions for this implementation:
     • .into_iter(): traverse the directory tree
     • .filter + .is_match: filters files that don't match with the given regex strings
     • .collect: collects all file paths into one vector

How To Run

To run, go to the repository and run either implementations via:

# To run imp.rs:
cargo run --bin imp -- "**/*.txt" "\d+"

# To run fp.rs:
cargo run --bin fp -- "**/*.txt" "\d+"

Sample calls + demo

cargo run --bin imp -- "**/*.txt" "\d+"

cargo run --bin fp -- "**/*.txt" "\d+"

The image above shows the result of a sample command for both imperative and functional implementations. The files listed are files which have contents that match to the given regex "\d+"