Question

I am relatively new to Ruby and need to write a script that will handle mulitple input files. It should be called like so:

script.rb -i file*

where the directory contains multiple files, like file1.xml, file2.xml and so on.
Just a quick question: How will this wildcard be expanded? Do I need to program that in my script? I am using the OptionParser Class for parsing commandline arguments.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The wildcard is expanded by the command line so you’ll get a list of each file in the directory

C:\working>dir *.txt

05/10/2007 03:24 PM 46,101      config.txt
11/23/2004 11:54 AM 361           tips.txt
2 File(s) 46,462 bytes

If you do,

C:\working>ruby -e "puts ARGV" *.txt
config.txt
tips.txt

Ruby converts string *.txt into the matching filenames and pass in the
expanded array as the new argument.

Using optparse:

options = {}
OptionParser.new do |opts|
    opts.on("-i", Array, "List files") do |v|
      options[:files] = v
    end
  end.parse!

p options

C:\working> script.rb -i *.txt

Will print out:

["config.txt","tips.txt"]

Will result in options[:files] being an array of strings

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/111252