From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2006-10-03T17:50:07+09:00
Subject: Re: shell, ruby and regexp

"Une b�vue" <pere.noel@laponie.com.invalid> wrote:
> ok i've done THE MISTAKE to rememeber zsh as a priority over ruby )))

It's not so much a "priority" as simple order of things happening (you can 
read that on each shell's man page): first a command line undergoes various 
substitutions (these change between shells and syntax used in the command 
line), only *then* the result of these subsitutions is handed off to the 
process forked (or shell internal command).

> my answer to "What's wrong with the original string enclosed in
> quotes?"
>
> that didn't work, my script sees it as a string and even if (for this
> arg and if enclosed with //) :

The point is, your script sees *every* argument as string.  There is no 
other type of arguments for process execs.  If you need conversion, you have 
to do it yourself.  For example

ARGV.map! do |arg|
  case arg
    when %r{\A/.*/[io]*\z}
      eval arg
    when %r{[+-]?\d+}
      arg.to_i
    else
      arg
  end
end

> may be here i've missed something too...

I guess you were mindset that there needs to be some mechanism to 
automatically convert process arguments for you.  That does not exist - at 
least not in Ruby.

Kind regards

    robert