CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubylinuxdirectory
Heiko Becker
Heiko Becker

Reputation: 576

Where does ~/ point in Ruby?

I'm starting with Ruby programming and I want to write a small script that involves the creation of a directory.

When I use system 'mkdir', '-p' '~/.dir' no directory is created. But when I change it to /home/name/dir everything works as expected. As I want to keep the script generic, how can I achieve the usual Unix/Linux semantics of ~/?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 151

Answers (2)

toro2k
toro2k

Reputation: 19228

In Ruby, ~ has no special meaning in file paths. Even if it is used inside the parameter of a system call, it is not expanded by the underlying shell. Your code should have created a directory literally named ~ inside the current working directory, for example:

$ ruby -e 'system("mkdir", "-p", "~/.dir")'
$ ls
~
$ ls -A '~'
.dir

You have to use File.expand_path to expand the ~ to your home directory path:

File.expand_path('~')
# => "/home/toro2k"

In your example:

system('mkdir', '-p', File.expand_path('~/.dir'))

In Ruby you can also use FileUtils.mkdir_p to create directories:

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p(File.expand_path('~/.dir'))

Update: as suggested by the Tin Man my latter example can be rewritten using the Pathname class as follows:

require 'pathname'
Pathname.mkpath(Pathname.new('~/.dir').expand_path)

Upvotes: 5

Alok Anand
Alok Anand

Reputation: 3356

It points to hidden directory .dir just under your user's root directory.

here ~/ represents user's root directory.

~ is not related to directory semantics in Ruby.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions