Question

this is what i have for my small ruby program. It may seem trivial but it doesn’t seem to be working.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

location = "/home/"

puts %x ("ls " + location)

I get an error saying this syntax error, unexpected tSTRING_BEG, expecting $end
puts %x (“ls ” + location).

Can someone offer me an explanation to what i’m doing wrong? Thank you

Answer 1

You need to put the brackets immediately adjacent to the %x or it’s not syntactically valid:

%x( ... )  # Valid, enclosed with brackets.
%x ( ... ) # Invalid, %x alone makes no sense.

Like %q and others, %x can use [ ], { } and < > as brackets.