From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-03-11T08:49:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Thinking of learning Ruby

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003 06:59:27 +0900, jeepcreep wrote:
>THANX all! I got cygwin running. Two other questions though:
>
> - when I click on the .rb module the command sceen blanks and
> disappears so I can't see the result; if I execute from the
> command line, I see the result - what gives?

This is normal Windows stuff. The command window is executed and
terminated automatically. You may be able to change the properties
for default launching to keep a window around even if it terminates
abnormally, but I personally don't like that so I don't use it.
Rather, I'll launch cmd.exe and then run my Ruby scripts that way.

> - because ruby.exe is in the bin directory, I can only execute the
> .rb from there; in other words, I can only store the .rb in the
> same directory as ruby.exe; how do I get around this?

You shouldn't need to. Check your environment variables and add the
Ruby path if necessary (add it here:)

  Right click on My Computer
    Properties
      Advanced
        Environment Variables

The path should include your Ruby path. Try running cmd.exe and
doing "SET PATH". You should see the Ruby path in there. Also, try
typing ruby -v ("ruby 1.6.8 (2002-12-24) [i586-mswin32]"). One other
thing is that the Pragmatic Programmers windows installer also does
a file association:

    C:\> assoc .rb
    .rb=rbFile
    C:\> ftype rbFile
    rbFile="c:\Apps\Ruby\bin\ruby.exe" "%1" %*
  
This means that you can run "script.rb" as:

    C:\> script

-austin