Question

Update

Ignore the following. It turned out to be a bug restricted to Macruby 0.10 and probably specific to my install. I’ll leave the post in case anyone else hits the problem.

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I seemed to misunderstood something about ruby blocks. I wanted to use the Pathname or Find module’s find to locate a specific file within a specific directory tree. However, I cannot get the block provided to find to return any value.

Since this:

n= (1..10).each {|i| break i if i > 5} 
puts "n = #{n}" #=> n=6

… works (and is a common construction) I expected that either:

starting_directory= #... a directory path
file_name_I_want_to_find= #... a file name e.g. my_file.txt
pd=Pathname.new(starting_directory)
path=pd.find{|p| break p if p.basename.to_s==file_name_I_want_to_find } 
puts "path = #{path}" #=> path = 

… or:

path=Find.find(starting_directory) {|p| break p if p.include?(file_name_I_want_to_find) } 
puts "path = #{path}" #=> path = 

… would produce just the one sought path but neither produces a value at all.

I know my test works because both of the following:

pd.find{|p| puts p if p.basename.to_s==file_name_I_want_to_find } 
#=> /path/to/file_name_I_want_to_find

Find.find(starting_directory) {|p| puts p if p.include?(file_name_I_want_to_find) } 
#=> /path/to/file_name_I_want_to_find

… work as expected.

Why doesn’t break with find work the way it does in the first example?

More generally, am I using the correct ruby technique/idiom for this circumstance?

Answer 1

It seems that using break works on ruby-1.8.7-p334 (MRI) on OSX, as well as JRuby-1.6.1.