From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-01-23T21:16:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing HTML / following links etc

Alle Wednesday 23 January 2008, Dan Cuddeford ha scritto:
> Mmmm thanks for your advice. One thought - is it possible to get ruby is
> run wget externally and pull into a directory and then set ruby off to
> do its magic once this is done?

In ruby, you can execute a command in a subshell using the system method or 
the backticks (`) operator. This way, you can create a ruby script which 
downloads what you need using wget, then goes on doing whatever you want with 
those files. To run the command in your original post from ruby, you'd use

system 'wget http://www.digg.com -r -l 2'

or

`wget http://www.digg.com -r -l 2`

The difference between the two methods is that system returns true or false 
depending on wether the command exited correctly or with an error status, 
while `cmd` returns the standard output of cmd (which is not displayed on 
screen).

I hope this helps

Stefano