I started going through the The Rust Programming Language to learn rust. I’m using the rustic package to edit files, run cargo, etc.

Having run cargo build in the sample hello_cargo project, I wanted to run the executable file from within Dired. I realized there’s no obvious way to do this in Dired or Dired-X, and that’s probably a good thing. If it was easy I can imagine all sorts of havoc with people accidentally, or intentionally, runnning files out of Dired. Too easy.

But it occurred to me that bash has command to run the next word in the command line as a command. I tried ! command in Dired, but since the directory isn’t in the path, it told me

/bin/bash: line 1: hello_cargo: command not found

Okay, update PATH before running command: ! PATH=.:$PATH command. This actually works, but decades of training give me a queasy feeling about adding . to PATH. How about $PWD instead? ! PATH=$PWD:$PATH command. Yep, that works too.

But of course, with rustic, I can use C-c C-p r to run cargo run to run the command. But trying to run the file on the line in Dired was an interesting diversion!