Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Saturday, February 19, 2005

Ruby for Object-Oriented Shell Scripts

Matz brilliantly included backticks (`) in Ruby as a low-profile way to integrate system commands into a Ruby script. This means that Ruby can be used to create powerful object-oriented shell scripts. Now you never have to write a batch file or bash script again!

Below is an example that queries Slashdot for its top 3 headlines every hour. Note the cool Ruby string substitution on the "count" parameter.

class Slashdot
def headlines(count)
`lynx -source "http://slashdot.org" | grep "</A>: " | sed "s#.*</A>: \\(.*\\)</B>.*#\\1#" | head --lines=#{count}`
end
end

while true
puts Slashdot.new.headlines(3)
`sleep 1h`
end

2 Comments:

  • Wrapping shell scripts in Objects does not make it any more OO, than wrapping binary data in two xml-tags makes it well-structured sematic data. ;)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2/20/2005 11:10 a.m.  

  • You gotta admit though that it's more fun to write a Ruby script that a bash script.

    By Blogger Jonathan, at 2/20/2005 12:33 p.m.  

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