system

use Core.system

The system module provides functions to interact with the system, for example to execute system commands.

Function Name	Parameter Types	Return Types	Possible Errors
`system_command`	`str`	`i32`, `str`	`ErrSystem`
`get_cwd`	No	`str`	No
`get_path`	`str`	`str`	No

error sets

These are the error sets this Core module provides.

ErrSystem

This error set does not have a parent error, so it directly and only extends anyerror directly. These are the possible values this error could have:

Error Value	Description
`EmptyCommand`	The provided command was empty
`SpawnFailed`	Process could not be created

functions

These are the functions this Core module provides.

The system_command function executes a given command, for example ls -lah and returns the exit code of the given command together with the output of the command, stored in a string. The function can throw an error if the process (the command) cannot be created.

use Core.print
use Core.system

def main():
    (exit_code, output) = system_command("ls");
    print($"exit_code = {exit_code}\n");
    print($"--- OUTPUT ---\n {output}");

This program will print these lines to the console:

exit_code = 0
--- OUTPUT ---
build
build.zig
build.zig.zon
cmake
CMakeLists.txt
compile_flags.txt
documents
examples
fetch_crt.sh
include
LICENSE
logfile
lsp
main
main.o
main.obj
output.ll
README.md
resources
scripts
src
test
test_files
test.o
tests
vendor

get_cwd

The get_cwd function is used to get the current working directory. The current working directory is the directory in which the program was executed in. It's main purpose is to be used together with the get_path function to get paths to files relative to the executed program's directory.

use Core.print
use Core.system

def main():
    str cwd = get_cwd();
    print($"cwd = {cwd}\n");

This program will print a line like this to your console:

cwd = /home/zweiler1/env/flint/flintc

get_path

The get_path function is used to convert a string to the platform-specific requirements for paths. You could get the cwd and then point to a file in a directory down, on Linux you would of course first get the cwd and store it in a variable like cwd and then to create the path to the file you would use string interpolation like $"{cwd}/subdir/file.txt". But the / symbols are only used in Linux for paths, on Windows the \\ is used instead so you would need to write $"{cwd}\\subdir\\file.txt" instead (\\ because the backslash is used to escape a character, and the escaped backslash is just a single backslash character). For this very use-case we use the get_path function. You pass in your path created using the string interpolation into the get_path function and it gives you back the exact same path, but with all the platform-specific requirements applied to it.

use Core.print
use Core.system

def main():
    str cwd = get_cwd();
    str path_to_file = get_path($"{cwd}\\subdir\\file.txt");
    print($"path_to_file = {path_to_file}\n");