From: "Berger, Daniel" <djberge@...>
Date: 2003-03-06T07:03:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question regarding drives

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mgushee@havenrock.com [mailto:mgushee@havenrock.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 12:00 PM
> To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
> Subject: Re: Newbie question regarding drives
> 
> 
> On 6 Mar 2003 at 3:29, Chris Morris wrote:
> 
> > From: "Sperberg, Roger" <roger.sperberg@aspenpublishers.com>
> 
> > > Can someone advise me of how to find out within my Ruby 
> program what
> > drives
> > > are on a system, and what type of drive (local hard 
> drive, floppy, 
> > > CD-ROM,
> > > etc.) they are?
> > >
> > > I'm working with a Win2000 system, but it might also be used by 
> > > someone running Linux.
> 
> > IIRC, I don't think there's a handy cross-platform solution.
> 
> And I wouldn't expect to find one, given that Windows and Unix-like 
> platforms treat drives very differently. Unix (including Linux) 
> doesn't even have a notion of "drives" in the sense that you mean it: 
> it provides a unified view of all available storage, wherein various 
> storage devices can be attached to the (virtual) filesystem at 
> arbitrary points. IMHO, this is very user-friendly--after all, why 
> should the user have to worry about *which* hard drive to use? 
> Storage is storage is storage. However, a side-effect of this design 
> is that if you do need to identify the storage devices, it takes 
> significantly more work than it does for Windows.
> 
> --
> Matt Gushee
> Englewood, CO USA

For *nix systems, see Mike Hall's "filesystem" module
(http://www.enteract.com/~mghall/ruby/ruby.html).  You'll be able to
identify floppy/cdrom drives by name (e.g. /mnt/floppy).

Regards,

Dan