From: Philip Mak <pmak@...>
Date: 2002-07-02T08:31:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Question: ruby vs. ksh

On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 08:20:11AM +0900, David Douthitt wrote:
> Why should I use (or when should I use) ruby over ksh?

If you're doing something that involves a lot of shell commands and
doesn't need complicated parsing, ksh might be better. Take this webpage,
for example:

http://lina.aaanime.net/

It is a page that shows the current status (uptime, free, df -k) of my
machine. It's written in #!/bin/sh since I can directly call the
status commands from that. It used to be in Perl, until I realized I
was just making a bunch of system() calls anyway.

> PS: How do I do mkdir -p in ruby?

Maybe this:

begin
    Dir.mkdir path
rescue Errno::EEXIST
    # ignore error if directory exists
end

That simulates the "do nothing if directory already exists" part of
"mkdir -p". It doesn't simulate the "make all parent directories if
necessary" part, though. If you need that too, you might use
path.split('/').each somehow to iterate through all the parent
directories. I don't know if there's an easy one-liner that does
"mkdir -p"; I'll let someone else answer that.

You could system("mkdir -p #{path}") as a quick and easy hack, but
make sure 'path' is secured. If a hacker can feed "; rm -rf /" to that
variable, it would screw you up.