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

Don't forget the spawn command to create a background process to execute the specified command. You can even wait for its completion using the Process class and the returned pid:

pid = spawn("tar xf ruby-2.0.0-p195.tar.bz2")
Process.wait pid

pid = spawn(RbConfig.ruby, "-eputs'Hello, world!'")
Process.wait pid

The doc says: This method is similar to #system but it doesn't wait for the command to finish.