From: Dan Q <quinxex@...>
Date: 2009-11-11T08:00:43+09:00
Subject: Calling a subprocess with specific arguments and capturing its 	output?

Hi. I haven't written Ruby in a while, and I was wondering if someone
could help with a problem I've never managed to solve. I'm writing a
shell script that takes filenames as its arguments, and calls "du" to
get their size. Because I don't want to have to escape everything
perfectly, I was looking for a function with a syntax that allows
separate arguments, like system("du", "-sh", filename).

system() doesn't allow me to capture the output of the subprocess,
while popen , ``, and %x() don't let me specify a list of discrete
arguments. Is there an elegant solution to this problem? My current
solution is to just escape the arguments and put them into a string,
but this is ugly and buggy.

Thanks in advance!
-Dan