From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-06-09T04:42:06+09:00
Subject: Re: How to redirect $stdin to read from a string?

On Sunday 08 June 2008 14:13:54 A. Lester Buck III wrote:

> require 'stringio'
> 
> $stdin = StringIO.new "This is the test message"
> 
> system("smbclient -M netbiosname")

That only affects the stdin variable -- and if it did do what you're thinking, 
that's probably not a good idea anyway. You probably don't want to set stdout 
for the entire rest of your program.

What you probably want is something like popen:

def send_message message, netbiosname
  IO.popen "smbclient -M #{netbiosname}", 'w' do |io|
    message.each_line do |line|
      io.write line
    end
  end
  raise 'smbclient failed' unless $?.success?
end

I'm using each_line because it exists on both String and IO -- so you don't 
have to wrap the message in a StringIO. It won't work very well for large 
chunks of binary, but I don't think you'll be sending those...