shelling out to the man
In irb: get a listing of files/sym/hard links in my home directory
In ruby script: Return the result of a command line operation. Without back-ticks ruby will just return true or false from the exit of the issued command. [wikipedia backticks - computer related]
Ruby Docs have massive amount of info about ERRNO (whatever the fuck it is - i'm guessing errors and such but haven't learned it yet). These error objects matter greatly and I think ruby has them wrapped up in a rubish way, but as I said I'm ignorant at the moment. I guess there is shorthand for error objects: $! - last exception; $@ - backtrace; There are many more of these. (whimper!)
# stupid simple shell command - from irb or a script to get file listing system 'ls -al ~/jeremy '
In ruby script: Return the result of a command line operation. Without back-ticks ruby will just return true or false from the exit of the issued command. [wikipedia backticks - computer related]
# the path to ghostscript on the system without the newline character on the end gs_path = `which gs`.strip # use the path to convert a file outside of ruby - will return true or false system %(#{gs_path} -q -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE#tiffg4 -sOutputFile#foo.pdf foo.tif -c quit 2>/dev/null) # if I want the output from the command suppressed so it doesn't spew oodles of info (after I'm sure it works - it will stop useful errors as well) `#{gs_path} -q -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE#tiffg4 -sOutputFile#foo.pdf foo.tif -c quit 2>/dev/null`
Ruby Docs have massive amount of info about ERRNO (whatever the fuck it is - i'm guessing errors and such but haven't learned it yet). These error objects matter greatly and I think ruby has them wrapped up in a rubish way, but as I said I'm ignorant at the moment. I guess there is shorthand for error objects: $! - last exception; $@ - backtrace; There are many more of these. (whimper!)