abhinavmsra / ruby_scripts

Basics of Ruby Scripting

#Basics of Ruby Scripts

Ruby started as an object-oriented scripting language. As it's popularity grew as a general-purpose programming language, the scripting aspect was largely overshadowed.

In this tutorial, I will present the basics of Ruby Scripting.

1. Create a file ruby_script.rb. One can also have a .sh extension as that of a Unix shell script.

2. On the command line, navigate to the directory holding the file. Then grant the execute permissions to the file.

    chmod +x ruby_script.rb
   

   With that, we are good to go.

3. Open the file in a text editor. The first thing we ought to do is instruct the parent shell to use ruby interpreter to execute our script. This is what shebang are for. So, the first line of our script should always be

#! /usr/bin/env ruby

4. With the interpreter assigned, we can now fill our scripts with ruby statements. Let's have the traditional Hello World script. For that, your script should look like this:

 #! /usr/bin/env ruby
 # my first hello world script
 puts 'Hello World'

5. Now just run the script. Open the terminal and run the following:

./ruby_script.rb

You should have the greeting displayed in the terminal.