How to call shell commands from Ruby

Question

How do I call shell commands from inside of a Ruby program? How do I then get output from these commands back into Ruby?

Answer 1

You can also use the backtick operators (`), similar to Perl:

directoryListing = `ls /`
puts directoryListing # prints the contents of the root directory

Handy if you need something simple.

Which method you want to use depends on exactly what you're trying to accomplish; check the docs for more details about the different methods.