The purpose of this crate is to make it a bit more ergonomic for portable applications that need to work with the platform level `RawFd` and `RawHandle` types. Rather than conditionally using `RawFd` and `RawHandle`, the `FileDescriptor` type can be used to manage ownership, duplicate, read and write. ## FileDescriptor This is a bit of a contrived example, but demonstrates how to avoid the conditional code that would otherwise be required to deal with calling `as_raw_fd` and `as_raw_handle`: ``` use filedescriptor::{FileDescriptor, FromRawFileDescriptor, Result}; use std::io::Write; fn get_stdout() -> Result { let stdout = std::io::stdout(); let handle = stdout.lock(); FileDescriptor::dup(&handle) } fn print_something() -> Result<()> { get_stdout()?.write(b"hello")?; Ok(()) } ``` ## Pipe The `Pipe` type makes it more convenient to create a pipe and manage the lifetime of both the read and write ends of that pipe. ``` use filedescriptor::Pipe; use std::io::{Read, Write}; let mut pipe = Pipe::new()?; pipe.write.write(b"hello")?; drop(pipe.write); let mut s = String::new(); pipe.read.read_to_string(&mut s)?; assert_eq!(s, "hello"); ``` ## Socketpair The `socketpair` function returns a pair of connected `SOCK_STREAM` sockets and functions both on posix and windows systems. ``` use std::io::{Read, Write}; let (mut a, mut b) = filedescriptor::socketpair()?; a.write(b"hello")?; drop(a); let mut s = String::new(); b.read_to_string(&mut s)?; assert_eq!(s, "hello"); ``` ## Polling The `mio` crate offers powerful and scalable IO multiplexing, but there are some situations where `mio` doesn't fit. The `filedescriptor` crate offers a `poll(2)` compatible interface suitable for testing the readiness of a set of file descriptors. On unix systems this is a very thin wrapper around `poll(2)`, except on macOS where it is actually a wrapper around the `select(2)` interface. On Windows systems the winsock `WSAPoll` function is used instead. ``` use filedescriptor::*; use std::time::Duration; use std::io::{Read, Write}; let (mut a, mut b) = filedescriptor::socketpair()?; let mut poll_array = [pollfd { fd: a.as_socket_descriptor(), events: POLLIN, revents: 0 }]; // sleeps for 20 milliseconds because `a` is not yet ready assert_eq!(poll(&mut poll_array, Some(Duration::from_millis(20)))?, 0); b.write(b"hello")?; // Now a is ready for read assert_eq!(poll(&mut poll_array, Some(Duration::from_millis(20)))?, 1); ```