Ruby Best Practices

Working with Files

There are a whole slew of options for doing various file management tasks in Ruby. Because of this, it can be difficult to determine what the best approach for a given task might be. In this section, we’ll cover two key tasks while looking at three of Ruby’s standard libraries.

First, you’ll learn how to use the pathname and fileutils libraries to traverse your filesystem using a clean cross-platform approach that rivals the power of popular *nix shells without sacrificing compatibility. We’ll then move on to how to use tempfile to automate handling of temporary file resources within your scripts. These practical tips will help you write platform-agnostic Ruby code that’ll work out of the box on more systems, while still managing to make your job easier.

Using Pathname and FileUtils

If you are using Ruby to write administrative scripts, it’s nearly inevitable that you’ve needed to do some file management along the way. It may be quite tempting to drop down into the shell to do things like move and rename directories, search for files in a complex directory structure, and other common tasks that involve ferrying files around from one place to the other. However, Ruby provides some great tools to avoid this sort of thing.

The pathname and fileutils standard libraries provide virtually everything you need for file management. The best way to demonstrate their capabilities is by example, so we’ll now take a look at some code and then break it down piece by piece.

To illustrate ...