From: Farrel Lifson Date: 2006-04-04T19:34:38+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for system administration You might want to look at IO.popen. It allows you to run a command and communicate with it (and receive output) via pipes which to your script will just be an IO object with all the associated methods like readlines,puts etc etc. I'm using it in a project currently and it's quite easy to use. Farrel