Rust Output Location Options

Rust Output Location Options | Generated by AI

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You’re asking a great question that touches on how Rust projects are typically structured and built!

When you use rustc directly, you have two main options to specify the output location:

-o <output_filename>: This option specifies the exact path and filename for the compiled executable or library.
```
rustc scripts/rust/example.rs -o test/example
```
This will compile example.rs and place the executable named example directly into the test/ directory. If test/ doesn’t exist, rustc will create it.
--out-dir <output_directory>: This option specifies a directory where rustc should place all generated output files (the executable/library, along with any intermediate files like .d, .rmeta, etc.).
```
rustc scripts/rust/example.rs --out-dir test/
```
In this case, rustc will compile example.rs and place the executable (which will be named example by default, derived from the source file name) inside the test/ directory.

Recommendation: Use Cargo for Projects

While rustc directly gives you fine-grained control, for most Rust projects, you’ll want to use Cargo. Cargo is Rust’s build system and package manager, and it simplifies managing dependencies, building, testing, and running your code.

With Cargo, the output binaries are typically placed in a target directory within your project root. For example, if you have a project set up with Cargo:

my_project/
├── Cargo.toml
└── src/
    └── main.rs

When you run cargo build or cargo run, the compiled executable will be placed in my_project/target/debug/my_project (for debug builds) or my_project/target/release/my_project (for release builds).

If you want to control the target directory for Cargo, you can:

CARGO_TARGET_DIR environment variable:
```
CARGO_TARGET_DIR=./test cargo build
```
This will place the entire target directory (containing debug, release, etc.) inside your test/ directory. The executable would then be at test/debug/my_project.
--target-dir command-line option for Cargo:
```
cargo build --target-dir test/
```
This does the same as the environment variable.
.cargo/config.toml: You can set a default target-dir for all Cargo projects on your machine or for a specific workspace by adding it to a .cargo/config.toml file.

Why use Cargo?

Standardized Project Layout: Cargo enforces a common project structure, making it easy for other Rust developers to understand your code.
Dependency Management: Cargo handles downloading and compiling your project’s dependencies automatically.
Testing and Benchmarking: Cargo has built-in commands for running tests (cargo test) and benchmarks (cargo bench).
Release Management: Cargo helps with creating release builds (cargo build --release) and publishing crates to crates.io.

Unless you have a very specific reason not to, it’s highly recommended to organize your Rust code into a Cargo project.

Given your git status output:

Your git status shows example and scripts/rust/ as untracked. This suggests you might be compiling scripts/rust/example.rs directly with rustc outside of a Cargo project.

If example is the compiled binary, then the previous rustc scripts/rust/example.rs command placed it in the current directory (lzwjava.github.io).

To achieve your goal of putting it in test/example (assuming test is a directory at the root of lzwjava.github.io), you would use:

rustc scripts/rust/example.rs -o test/example

This is the most direct way to get the specific output path you asked for using rustc.

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