ruby system command check exit code

Question

I have a bunch of system calls in ruby such as the following and I want to check their exit codes simultaneously so that my script exits out if that command fails.

Answer 1

You're not capturing the result of your system call, which is where the result code is returned:

exit_code = system("ruby test.rb")

Remember each system call or equivalent, which includes the backtick-method, spawns a new shell, so it's not possible to capture the result of a previous shell's environment. In this case exit_code is true if everything worked out, nil otherwise.

The popen3 command provides more low-level detail.