From: Garance A Drosehn <drosihn@...>
Date: 2006-09-01T11:39:43+09:00
Subject: Rescuing a 'require'

I wanted to use Socket.gethostname to get the current hostname
without executing a unix command.  So:

require 'socket'
$this_host = Socket.gethostname

I have to run this code on several platforms, and it turned out that
some of them do not have 'socket'.  So, my first idea was change
it to:

begin
   require 'socket'
   $this_host = Socket.gethostname
rescue
    $this_host = `hostname`.chomp
end

but the require still caused the script to terminate on the platforms
which didn't have 'socket'.  I already have an alternate solution for
this specific case, but I'm wondering if there was something that I
missed.  Is there any way to catch errors from a require command?

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =             drosihn@gmail.com
Senior Systems Programmer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA