From: gregb@... (Gregory Benjamin)
Date: 2002-04-26T10:17:15+09:00
Subject: Ruby as a "sh" sucessor language

I'm interested in using ruby as a super replacement for "sh" scripts.
I want to do the same sort of mundane things.

Check command line arguments
Make sure files exist
Make sure files are readable
create directories
move files from one place to another
temporarily change directories
scan through files doing awk/perl pattern replacement, extraction
write new files
remove files
run external commands and pipe the results
etc.

I learn best by example -- sample code is what I'm looking for,
but a book entitled "Using Ruby as a Bourne-shell replacement"
or something similar would be great.

If I learn some OO stuff along the way that's OK too, but mostly
I want a way to do what one normally does with sh, without using
perl (which I've used a long time but see Ruby as a cleaner approach).

Thanks