From: Eric Wong Date: 2014-10-11T05:42:17+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:65612] Re: [ruby-trunk - Bug #10362] spawn doesn't raise exception on redirection error On the other hand, maybe we should allow Ruby-level options to `system' to raise, but continue hiding errors when running the command itself. In other words: # continue old 1.8 behavior if redirect is done via shell # (n.b. this example is bad practice, but just an example) system('true >bad/file.txt') -> nil So I think the original example by Dmitry should raise: system('true', out: %w(bad/file.txt w)) -> Errno... Maybe this (potentially incompatible) change can be acceptable for 2.2 (if not, then for Ruby 3.0)