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.