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

The backticks (`) method is the easiest one to call shell commands from Ruby. It returns the result of the shell command:

     url_request = 'http://google.com'
     result_of_shell_command = `curl #{url_request}`