From: Avdi Grimm <avdi@...>
Date: 2008-08-12T23:44:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Sigh! I'm depressed. Debian vs Ruby and the backtick and subshells

>> I am using Debian sid, which sh is bash.
>> And, in fact, I hate ruby's way of system call. Ugly and hard to use and
>> stupid hardcoded.
>
> The choice of `` is deliberate. It's to inspire you to get off your lazy
> butt and learn the Ruby-internal way to do something, such as Pathname.glob.
> There's always a way to avoid a shell command...

The backtick syntax is a convenience inherited from Bash and Perl.  It
makes one very common simple case of shell interaction easy and
concise.  I typically only use backticks in quick one-off scripts.  If
I need to interact with the shell in a larger program I avoid it and
use either system() (for clarity) or popen*() (for greater control).

-- 
Avdi

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