From: Tim Heaney <theaney@...>
Date: 2005-01-23T23:05:54+09:00
Subject: Re: File.read not returning nil [newbie]

Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca> writes:
>
> I am completely confused.  The documentation says it should print nil:
>
> http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ref_c_io.html#IO.read
>
> It does return nil in my first test case.

It doesn't for me. I get the empty string both times. But why?

It looks like there was a similar discussion in August of 2002

  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-dev/18089

but I don't know how to read Japanese. Nonetheless, I clearly get a
different result than the one shown there

  $ ruby -e 'p IO.read("/dev/null")'
  ""
  $ ruby -v
  ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [i686-linux]