CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby
zsimpson
zsimpson

Reputation: 815

Running another ruby script with globals intact?

For reasons that are a little hard to explain, I need to do the following: I have a master.rb file that sets some global like: a = 1. I want to call another file other_file.rb that will run with the globals that were set in the master file. In python I'd use runpy.run_module( 'other_module', globals() ).

Can anyone think of an equivalent in Ruby? I've looked at require, include, and load, but none seem to do quite what I need, specifically they don't pull the globals into the other_file.rb. Note that I am not trying to fork a new process, just hand execution over to "other_module" while maintaining the state of the globals.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 82

Answers (2)

tadman
tadman

Reputation: 211560

If you absolutely must, you can use globals, and they're declared with the $ prefix. They are highly discouraged because there is only one global namespace, which makes collisions possible. Generally they are used for interpreter configuration, like $LOAD_PATH.

A better approach is to use a module that has instance variables:

module MyContainer
  def self.settings
    @settings ||= { }
  end
end

MyContainer.settings[:foo] = :bar

This has the advantage of keeping your variables contained in a namespace while not preventing other sub-programs from accessing them.

Keep in mind this will only work within the context of the same Ruby process or children created using fork, so using system or exec will not work. Remember also that forked processes need to use IPC to communicate with their parent.

Upvotes: 4

Jim Deville
Jim Deville

Reputation: 10662

a=1 is not a global variable, it is a local variable that gets scoped to the file. If you really nee this behavior, use $a=1 to set global variables.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions