[ruby-talk:4700] Re: Getting started

[I originally posted this to comp.lang.ruby, but it apparently never made
it.]

Hi,

Steve Merrick wrote:
>
> Following the "getting started" from the Ruby User Guide, I typed
> >>ruby -v<< and I got >>ruby 1.4.0 (1999-08-13) [i386-cygwin]<<, as
> expected.
>
> Then I tried: >>ruby -le 'print "hello world\n"'<< and got >>ruby:0:
> Can't mktemp (fatal)<<.
>
> I have no idea what this means. If there's an answer in the FAQ or
> somewhere, I'm sorry, I can't find it. :-( Can anyone help, please? [I
> assume this is a very simple problem...]

That's an ancient version of Ruby, in web years. But the newer version
has a different variation on this.

Running under a Cygwin B20 bash shell under NT4, I got:

# ruby -v
ruby 1.4.5 (2000-06-26) [i386-mswin32]

# ruby -le 'print "Hello world!\n"'
C:\TEMP/rba00286:1: parse error
print ""Hello world!\n""
             ^
The extra quotes are puzzling clues to something, perhaps.

However, running under a so-called NT Command Prompt window, I got (with
the prompts trimmed):

>ruby -v
ruby 1.4.5 (2000-06-26) [i386-mswin32]

>ruby -le 'print "Hello world!\n"'
Hello world!

--
Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)