Question

Suppose I have a string called very_long_string whose content I want to send to the standard output. But since the string is very long, I want to use less to display the text on the terminal. When I use

`less #{very_long_string}`

I get File not found error message, and if I use:

`less <<< #{very_long_string}`

I get unexpected redirection error message.

So, how to use less from inside Ruby?

Answer 1

You could open a pipe and feed your string to less via its stdin.

IO.popen("less", "w") { |f| f.puts very_long_string }

(Assuming very_long_string is the variable holding your string.)

See: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.8.7/IO.html#method-c-popen