Question

I’m trying this in ruby.
I have a shell script to which I can pass a command which will be executed by the shell after some initial environment variables have been set. So in ruby code I’m doing this..

# ruby code
my_results = `some_script -allow username -cmd "perform_action"`

The issue is that since the script “some_script” runs “perform_action” in it’s own environment, I’m not seeing the result when i output the variable “my_results”. So a ruby puts of “my_results” just gives me some initial comments before the script processes the command “perform_action”.

Any clues how I can get the output of perform_action into “my_results”?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The backticks will only capture stdout. If you are redirecting stdout, or writing to any other handle (like stderr), it will not show up in its output; otherwise, it should. Whether something goes into stdout or not is not dependent on an environment, only on redirection or direct writing to a different handle.

Try to see whether your script actually prints to stdout from shell:

$ some_script -allow username -cmd "perform_action" > just_stdout.log
$ cat just_stdout.log

In any case, this is not a Ruby question. (Or at least it isn’t if I understood you correctly.) You would get the same answer for any language.