From: Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality <ihatespam@...>
Date: 2006-07-15T10:55:09+09:00
Subject: Some questions about Ruby and it's environment...

    I have two issues in Ruby which are bugging me.

    On my (MS Windows) system, I have a couple of programs to help me live 
my electronic life and some of them are written in Ruby (are they still 
called "programs" or are they "scripts?").  I keep all these programs in a 
directory and have an execution path to them.
    I also have some patterns that come up time and time again in my Ruby 
code so I have factored them out into their own files so I may "require" 
them in any of my Ruby scripts.
    The problem is that Ruby can't find them.  I had hoped that Ruby would 
search for "required" files in the directory of the running script but this 
doesn't appear to be the case.  I could have used the magic "$0" variable 
but then I'd have to operate on it before using it.  I also considered 
refactoring this work and using that but...
    Is there anything I can do to get Ruby to find these "required" scripts?

    My second issue is not very serious but a curiosity to me.  I used to 
use PERL so some of my useful "programs" are still written in that language. 
I tried to call a PERL script from a Ruby script and that myseriously 
failed.  I did a search on groups.google and found that you need to call the 
PERL interpreter, directly.  I found this a little odd since PERL scripts 
have no problem calling other PERL scripts.  It's not a problem of the 
environment, since Ruby can call executables in the execution path.
    So, what's up with that?  Why isn't the Ruby interpreter like PERL in 
this respect?

    Thank you for your help!