From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-09-20T10:40:05+09:00
Subject: Re: piping input when shelling out

Caio Chassot wrote:

> 
> On 2006-09-19, at 22:05 , Paul Lutus wrote:
> 
>> output = `echo #{s} | perl -pe "s/a/x/g"`
>>
>> I want to emphasize there are a dozen ways to do this. This one
>> happens to
>> be simple to understand. Another way is File.popen(), but that
>> approach
>> makes bidirectional communications difficult.
> 
> I thought about doing it with echo but then I'd have to escape the
> string, and what if I was dealing with binary data, and all that...
> so popen looks like a more robust solution.

Yes, except for the fact that you cannot easily find out what the child
process created as a result. But yes, if binary data is an issue,
File.popen() will reliably stream the data for you.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com