What does the “$” character mean in Ruby?

Question

Been playing with Ruby on Rails for awhile and decided to take a look through the actual source. Grabbed the repo from GitHub and started looking around. Came across some co

Answer 1

$ identifies a global variable, as opposed to a local variable, @instance variable, or @@class variable.

Among the language-supplied global variables are $:, which is also identified by $LOAD_PATH