CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubycommand-line-interface
fontno
fontno

Reputation: 6852

For a Ruby CLI, what is the most reliable way to change directory to users root/home directory?

Really I'm not sure whether to ask the user to make sure they are in their home directory before running the commands and abort if not or just change the directory for them?

Dir.chdir without an argument defaults to the users home directory, and when the block finishes it returns to the previous directory

Dir.chdir do 
  puts Dir.pwd
end

puts Dir.pwd

# => 'Users/Brian'

# => '/Users/Brian/gems/etc...'

I would need to chdir quite a few times throughout the code. Is this pretty reliable?

Anybody have any insight on the best way to do this kind of thing?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 78

Answers (1)

Kashyap
Kashyap

Reputation: 4796

To summarize Avdi Grimm's screencast on the same subject,

If you're using a Ruby version greater than 1.9, the Dir module provides a method #home. However, this depends on the environment variable HOME set on the user's shell session. To reliably get the home dir, you should pass in the login name of the current user to the Dir.home command. Or, in code:

# Works if HOME is set in the environment i.e., if "echo $HOME" returns the home directory
# when that command is run on the command-line
Dir.home     # => /Users/<username>, Works if HOME is set

# If the HOME environment variable is not set, you should explicitly pass in the username
# of the currently logged-in user
Dir.home(username)     # => /Users/<username>

# The current username can be obtained using
username = `whoami`

# or

require 'etc'
username = Etc.getlogin

Now for the final caveat: This works on *nix.

Upvotes: 1

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