The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second Edition

12.5. File tools from the standard library

File handling is an area where the standard library’s offerings are particularly rich. Accordingly, we’ll delve into those offerings more deeply here than anywhere else in the book. This isn’t to say that the rest of the standard library isn’t worth getting to know, but that the extensions available for file manipulation are so central to how most people do file manipulation in Ruby that you can’t get a firm grounding in the process without them.

We’ll look at the versatile FileUtils package first and then at the more specialized but useful Pathname class. Next you’ll meet StringIO, a class whose objects are, essentially, strings with an I/O interface; you can rewind them, seek through them, getc from ...