From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-12-30T00:23:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Beginners Question

On Dec 29, 2005, at 9:18 AM, joe quimby wrote:

> Hello Folks,
>
> I am trying to learn ruby, so i wrote some simple scripts.
> But the following script does not work as expected:
>
> #!/usr/bin/ruby
>
> while gets != nil
>   print $_
> end
>
> if i call 'echo.rb' (without any parameters) from my cygwin shell, the
> scripts does what i expect it to do. It reads and returns the input.
> But if i call it with any parameters, like
>
>   echo.rb anything
>
> i get a error message saying : '... `gets': No such file or  
> directory -
> 12 (Errno::ENOENT)...'
>
> Does anybody understand this ?

gets() reads from the files given as command-line arguments, or  
STDIN, if none were given.  So in your example above, "anything" is  
expected to be the path to a file that will be read.

Just FYI, your example is also a little Perlish.  Us Ruby guys  
generally write that as:

   ARGF.each_line do |line|
     puts line
   end

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II