How to interactively execute shell commands

Question

I have been looking into executing shell commands with std::process::Command. I have a problem when these commands use arguments. What I would like to do is to have a loop and in each iteration ask for an input and execute that string (no matter what) as it is as a shell command, capture its output and then jump on to the next iteration.

I have tried by splitting the string with variable.split_whitespaces() but this doesn't seem to work.

As a refactor, I would like the equivalent in rust to this python code

import os

while True:
    try:
        command = input(">> ")
        os.system(command)
    except:
        print("There was an error")

Answer 1

If you want to execute the input as a shell command, you have to give the command to a shell. The system-standard shell is usually available at /bin/sh and -c is how you execute a command from an argument. That would look roughly like this in Rust:

let output = std::process::Command::new("/bin/sh")
    .args(["-c", the_user_input])
    .output()?;