common-path

Documentation

A small crate that provides functions for determining the common prefix, if any, between a set of paths

Installation

In your Cargo.toml, add this to the [dependencies] section:

common-path = "1"

and in your crate root, add

// src/lib.rs, src/main.rs, etc
extern crate common_path;

Usage

There are two functions provided: common_path, and common_path_all

extern crate common_path;
use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    let a = Path::new("/a/b/c/d");
    let b = Path::new("/a/b/e/f");
    let prefix = common_path::common_path(a, b); // => Some(Path::new("/a/b"))
}

If you need to find a common prefix for more than 2 paths, common_path_all takes anything that can be turned into an iterator of Path references:

extern crate common_path;
use std::path::Path;

fn main() {
    let a = Path::new("/a/b/c/d");
    let b = Path::new("/a/b/e/f");
    let c = Path::new("/a/g/h/i");
    let prefix = common_path::common_path_all(vec![a, b, c]); // => Some(Path::new("/a"))
}

Notes

This library makes no attempt to canonicalize the paths, so 2 paths that should theoretically have a common prefix might get missed unless they are canonicalized beforehand.

For example, /foo/bar/baz and /foo/quux/../bar/baz/quuux should have the common prefix /foo/bar/baz, once they are canonicalized, but in this form, this library will return a prefix of /foo. If you call Path::canonicalize on them beforehand, you will get the "correct" prefix, but canonicalize will return on an error on paths that don't actually exist, so I wanted to avoid using it in this library.