“which in ruby”: Checking if program exists in $PATH from ruby

Question

my scripts rely heavily on external programs and scripts. I need to be sure that a program I need to call exists. Manually, I\'d check this using \'which\' in the commandlin

Answer 1

#####################################################
# add methods to see if there's an executable that's executable
#####################################################
class File
  class << self
    ###########################################
    # exists and executable
    ###########################################
    def cmd_executable?(cmd)
      !ENV['PATH'].split(':').select { |f| executable?(join(f, cmd[/^[^ \n\r]*/])) }.empty?
    end
  end
end

Answer 2

You can access system environment variables with the ENV hash:

puts ENV['PATH']

It will return the PATH on your system. So if you want to know if program nmap exists, you can do this:

ENV['PATH'].split(':').each {|folder| puts File.exists?(folder+'/nmap')}

This will print true if file was found or false otherwise.

Answer 3

True cross-platform solution, works properly on Windows:

# Cross-platform way of finding an executable in the $PATH.
#
#   which('ruby') #=> /usr/bin/ruby
def which(cmd)
  exts = ENV['PATHEXT'] ? ENV['PATHEXT'].split(';') : ['']
  ENV['PATH'].split(File::PATH_SEPARATOR).each do |path|
    exts.each do |ext|
      exe = File.join(path, "#{cmd}#{ext}")
      return exe if File.executable?(exe) && !File.directory?(exe)
    end
  end
  nil
end

This doesn't use host OS sniffing, and respects $PATHEXT which lists valid file extensions for executables on Windows.

Shelling out to which works on many systems but not all.

Answer 4

Here's what I'm using. This is platform neutral (File::PATH_SEPARATOR is ":" on Unix and ";" on Windows), only looks for program files that actually are executable by the effective user of the current process, and terminates as soon as the program is found:

##
# Returns +true+ if the +program+ executable is found in the user's path.
def has_program?(program)
  ENV['PATH'].split(File::PATH_SEPARATOR).any? do |directory|
    File.executable?(File.join(directory, program.to_s))
  end
end

Answer 5

I'd like to add that which takes the flag -s for silent mode, which only sets the success flag, removing the need for redirecting the output.

Answer 6

Use find_executable method from mkmf which is included to stdlib.

require 'mkmf'

find_executable 'ruby'
#=> "/Users/narkoz/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/ruby"

find_executable 'which-ruby'
#=> nil