From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2003-03-18T04:22:45+09:00
Subject: irb as a shell

Just a note.

In the past day or two I've started to use irb as a shell to work in, 
and it's very helpful, although not earth-shattering.

For example, I did the following in irb to unzip a bunch of files in my 
working directory:

system("ls *gz > list")
a=File.open("list","r")
b=a.readlines
b.each { |f| system("gtar -zxf #{f}") }
b.each { |f| system("rm -rf #{f}") }

I think this could be done with an ordinary shell, using xargs maybe, 
but I know how to do it in Ruby. If you have a more elegant way to 
write the Ruby lines, let me know. Looking at it, I can see that if I 
remembered the directory methods I could make the first 3 lines one 
line.