From: Tom Cloyd <tomcloyd@...>
Date: 2009-02-15T02:10:25+09:00
Subject: Re: simple ruby project layout question

David Masover wrote:
> Tom Cloyd wrote:
>> So, in the Ruby world, \bin simply means "whatever I'm using to 
>> launch my program", if it's used at all, right? And "\bin" is simply 
>> an anachronism - has always been done that way?
>
> Right -- and it's not unique to Ruby either.
>
> From your use of backslashes, I'm guessing you're on Windows, so I can 
> see your confusion. On Unix, quite often you find shell scripts in 
> various bin directories. A few examples from my system: /bin/which, 
> /usr/bin/git-svn, etc.
>
> I think the reason it's done this way is that once upon a time, most 
> or all of the files in those system directories were binary 
> executables. People probably started putting scripts there because it 
> was already in the PATH anyway, and it makes sense -- in the above 
> example, all the user really cares about is git-svn is another git 
> command, so to be consistent, why not put all of Git together? Even if 
> most commands are binary, but some are Perl scripts?
>
> So, in the Ruby world, bin is just "executables", binary or otherwise, 
> as distinct from lib, where you would find library code. Both are ruby 
> files, but bin/foo you might actually expect to set executable and run 
> as a command, whereas if you did the same to lib/foo.rb, it probably 
> wouldn't do anything.
>
>
James, David, thanks! Just wanted to make sure I understood.

Sad story: those backslashes were a slip. I've been off Windows for 
almost a year. It's been a long night, week, life. I'm tired. I was also 
trying to get past my first Bash script, and get Cucumber/RSpec based 
testing going, and I'm a bit boggled. For 15 min. I simply could NOT get 
a very simple bash script to launch 'cause I was invoking 
".\script-name". When I finally caught the problem and flipped the 
backslash, I felt pretty foolish. Not the first time, though!

t.

-- 

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