From: John Carter <john.carter@...>
Date: 2008-08-13T05:55:51+09:00
Subject: File redirects in Ruby? Was Re: Sigh! I'm depressed. Debian vs 	Rubyand the backtick and subshells

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Phlip wrote:

>>> build@ws1419:~/AutomatedBuild/test$ ruby -e 'system("ls
>>> NOFILEWITHTHISNAME&>foo")'
>
> Magicloud Magiclouds wrote:
>
>> 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...

There are two reasons I use ``.

1) Quick and easy. Much quicker to type ` ` than system " "

2) When I want the output of a program as a string, much easier to type
    `blah` than IO.read("|blah")

Whilst shell globbing has some shorthandedness about it, the main
reason is are file redirects. > &> >2&1

I'm quite happy to override `` with that trick someone mentioned above
if it grants me deterministic behaviour between client boxes. (I don't
care if its the wrong behaviour, so long as it's the _same_
behaviour!)

I often use Dir["bla*"] and glob with glee.

Anyone have a short and easy Ruby way of doing file redirects?




John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
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