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 a cool one that I use in a ruby script on OS X (so that I can start a script and get an update even after toggling away from the window):

cmd = %Q|osascript -e 'display notification "Server was reset" with title "Posted Update"'|
system ( cmd )