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

I wanna note something weird about Ruby!

$ does indeed mean load path. And ; means "end line". But!

$; means field separator. Try running $;.to_s in your REPL and you'll see it return ",". That's not all! $ with other suffixes can mean many other things.

Why? Well, Perl of course!