Question

In my Rails 3 project, in the controller, I use the command wget to download files from the Internet and place them on my server. In the controller, I want to check whether wget succeeds in downloading the files. How can I perform that check?

Answer 1

From the Ruby docs for the system command:

system returns true if the command gives zero exit status, false for
non zero exit status. Returns nil if command execution fails.

So, you could do something like this:

if system('wget fail')
   puts 'Success!'
else
   puts 'Fail!'
end