From: Csaba Henk <csaba.henk@...>
Date: 2007-12-05T10:55:04+09:00
Subject: Re: irb and unix shells

On Dec 2, 7:05 pm, Marc Heiler <sheve...@linuxmail.org> wrote:
> > Some day, some day, somebody smarter and more ambitious than me will
> > build that Ruby-native shell with all the joy of Ruby and command
> > line tools integrated...

> Second, I still have no real way on how to do piping of
> objects/data with a ruby shell. (After all we are talking of a
> real shell, no? One like in bash where you can apply filters...)

I started to create these tools some years ago, see:

 http://creo.hu/~csaba/ruby/pope/

Pope stands for "Powerful Piping Environment", a ruby implementation
of
the simple Unix IPC constructs (mainly pipes), and atop of it Urb,
an Irb hack which can be used as a shell (it has job control)
and features some syntax sugar to make this easy:

- basic Urb listener can do pipes like

    _("ls").|("grep '\.rb$'")_

  or if you need to be more exact (ie., you don't wanna rely on
  shellish command line parsing), you can do it like:

    _(["lame", "--decode", "Star Spangled Banner.mp3"]).|("oggenc -
ssb.ogg")._

  Irb completion is enhanced to make such lines easy to type.

- there is an other listener called Pidginsh, which can started with
"pidginsh"
  (and be left with ^D). It partially groks Bourne shell syntax and
dynamically
  translates shell commands to standard Urb calls. So in pidginsh

    ls | grep '\.rb$'

  will work and is equivalent with the above cited Urb command.

Alas, I didn't have the energy to finish this project and make it
really shine.
Even so, it's usable in its current form, I use it all the time
(however, you
probably won't end up like this, due to the lack of documentation :
(( ).

This code is available via Mercurial from http://mercurial.creo.hu/repos/pope/
or as a direct tarball download: http://mercurial.creo.hu/repos/pope/?archive/tip.tar.gz

Csaba