Question

I’m trying to access the original command line argument string in Ruby (ie – not using the pre-split/separated ARGV array). Does anyone know how to do this? For example:

$> ruby test.rb command "line" arguments

I want to be able to tell if ‘line’ had quotes around it:

"command \"line\" arguments"

Any tips? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, ruby is not removing those double-quotes from your command line. The shell is using them to interpolate the contents as a string and pass them along to ruby.

You can get everything that ruby receives like this:

cmd_line = "#{$0} #{ARGV.join( ' ' )}"

Why do you need to know what is in quotes? Can you use some other delimiter (like ‘:’ or ‘#’)?

If you need to, you can pass double-quotes to ruby by escaping them:

$> ruby test.rb command "\"line\"" arguments

The above cmd_line variable would receive the following string in that case:

test.rb comand "line" arguments