How to call shell commands from Ruby

Question

How do I call shell commands from inside of a Ruby program? How do I then get output from these commands back into Ruby?

Answer 1

Here's the best article in my opinion about running shell scripts in Ruby: "6 Ways to Run Shell Commands in Ruby".

If you only need to get the output use backticks.

I needed more advanced stuff like STDOUT and STDERR so I used the Open4 gem. You have all the methods explained there.