From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-07-23T13:44:56+09:00
Subject: Re: how do i open a terminal using ruby?

On Tuesday 22 July 2008 03:54:46 Sebastian Hungerecker wrote:
> Tim Pease wrote:
> > Kernel.exec '/bin/bash', '-c', "ruby #{__FILE__} #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
> 
> That won't open a terminal windows. It will simply execute bash which will 
> execute ruby, but if you weren't in a window before, you're still not.

I don't think there's any standard way to open another terminal _window_, 
given that some platforms allow you to install many different kinds of 
terminals in the first place, and there simply is no way to do this 
consistently and cross-platform.

On Windows, you could definitely call 'cmd'. On OS X, you're probably safe 
doing something with Terminal.app. But on Linux, what do you do? 
Gnome-terminal? Konsole? xterm? These are probably the most common to be 
installed, yet none are guaranteed...

You could always implement your own terminal, in your own GUI -- but then 
you'll irritate people who have a favorite terminal, and would rather work 
from there. So this only really makes sense if you're just going to go 
whole-hog and use the GUI for everything.

I think about all you can do here is detect that you're not running in a 
terminal, and if you're not, exit with an error. Most platforms make it easy 
enough to run a script in a terminal -- it's the default on Windows; OS X has 
a "script menu" that opens them in Terminal; and on typical Linux desktop 
environments, application launchers have a simple checkbox for "run in 
terminal", and double-clicking on a Ruby script should run it in a terminal 
anyway.