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

To quote the Ruby Forum:

ruby comes with a set of predefined variables

$: = default search path (array of paths)
__FILE__ = current sourcefile

if i get it right (not 100% sure) this adds the lib path to this array of search paths by going over the current file. which is not exactly the best way, i would simply start with RAILS_ROOT (at least for a rails project)