From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2003-09-13T02:35:43+09:00
Subject: Ruby $_ one-liners (was: Re: Global object instance?)

Hi,

From: "Ben Giddings" <bg-rubytalk@infofiend.com>
[...]
> There are many useful kernel methods that should 
> stick around.  I much prefer using puts to $stdout.puts(), but I 
> *really* think the String stuff that works on $_ should go.  Any thoughts?

I strongly disagree.  Removing these would mean I'd have to
keep my Perl skills honed, which is something I've been glad
to be able to let fade away... :)

Here are two Ruby one-liners I used just yesterday:

ruby -i -pe 'gsub(/#!\\Perl\\bin\\perl.exe/, "#!/usr/bin/perl")' *.cgi

ruby -i -pe 'gsub(/\015/, "")' *.cgi *.html *.pm *.txt

Something I love about Ruby is that, in addition to everything
else it does well, it still lets me write powerful simple one-
liners from the command line.  

(The one-liners above presumably need no explanation, but the
context was we were installing a package containing a lot of
Perl CGI scripts that had been developed on Windows, and they
needed some conversion--line endings, shebang line--in order
to work on Linux..... I.e. the point is not that there's 
anything special about these _specific_ one-liners... Just that
it's so easy to craft them in Ruby... If it weren't, I'd have
to go back to using Perl for such things... And I wouldn't like
that...)


Regards,

Bill