Text Processing with Ruby

Chapter 13Writing to Other Processes and to Files

We’ve looked at writing to standard output, a useful technique that allows our programs’ output to either be read by people or be redirected into another process as part of a pipeline chain. Sometimes, though, we don’t want to leave the choice of redirecting output up to the user of our program; we want to write directly to a file or to another process ourselves.

This might be so that we can persist our output between invocations of our program, storing up more data over time, in which case it would be useful to be able to write data to a file. Or it might be to harness the power of other programs, so that we can avoid reimplementing logic ourselves. We could achieve this by constructing our ...