Chapter 5. Building Files the Smart Way
One of the most brilliant design choices found in UNIX-style operating systems is the notion that "everything is just a file." In other words, if your programming language can do very basic reading/writing of files and a little string handling, you can drive the configuration and environment of every bit of software you care about.
In this chapter, we will explore the most common file-building methodologies and find out how to apply them the Ruby way. In particular, before getting down to writing a single byte, we'll discuss and create some safe file operations. Such operations are imperative in system maintenance and administration scripts. Thus we will deal with the safety issues before proceeding to discuss ...
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