From: "J.Hawkesworth" <J.Hawkesworth@...>
Date: 2002-11-13T01:17:40+09:00
Subject: [FAQ]  was RE: How do I get a '\'?

Gavin Sinclair requested that I sent this.  I hope it makes sense, is
true, and is of use.

Q: I'm working with files and directories on Windows.  How do I get a
'\' (the file separator)? 
    Whatever I try irb or 'p' shows me '\\'.
A: '\\' really does produce '\' when your code is run.  Both p and irb
use 'inspect', which returns 
 a "displayable" representation of a string that can be re-evalled back
into ruby. [Simon Cozens]
    Austin Ziegler notes that you can get away with using forward
slashes ('/') if you're only using Ruby file operations; only when
you're doing Windows-based file operations do you need to do:

	foo.gsub('/', '\\')

A (pointless) example:
	Dir.entries("C:ruby/bin")
	or
	Dir.entries("C:/ruby/bin")
works under Windows, but if you wanted to use the Windows command 'DIR'
you would have to write
	`Dir C:ruby\\bin`

While I've been typing, another possible FAQ entry occurs to me:

Q: How do I get a recursive list of all the files under a directory and
its subdirectories?  Dir.entries only gets me the files in the specified
directory.  Why isn't there a recursive version?
A: 'find' will probably do what you want.  The code below fills 'dirs'
with directories and 'files' with filenames for a given directory

	require 'find'
	dirs = []
	files = []
	Find.find(directory) {|f| 
		if FileTest.directory?(f)
			dirs.push(f)
		else
			files.push(f)
		end
	}

Please add to/edit/make corrections if needed.

All the best,

Jon

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