From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2003-05-26T08:09:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting '\' to be used as the separator in Dir.getwd -- how to?


On Sunday, May 25, 2003, at 05:56 PM, Richard wrote:

> [snip]
>  I don't see any cwd method defined in the Shell class, nor in its
> required modules:
>    shell/error
>    shell/command-processor
>    shell/process-controller
> and it didn't seem I'd find it in any of *their* required modules.  (I
> only checked the ftool.rb module)
>
> So how do the separators get transformed?  It looks like magic :-)
>
> Regards,
> Richard

Hi Richard,

I'm a relative newbie too so I learned from your analysis. I simply 
happen to have been exploring the Shell class because it is a 
relatively undocumented part of the standard library. A good resource 
is to run rdoc (available on the RAA) on particular Ruby files and view 
the result in a browser.

I think the Shell object keeps track of the current directory as it 
changes. See the the chdir method. On the separators, I just don't 
know. The default record separator is set to '/' unless replaced, but I 
don't see where it gets the alternate record separator for a non-Unix 
like system. Perhaps Cygwin supplies this for Ruby on Windows?