Ruby Cookbook

Recipe 23.1. Scripting an External Program Problem You want to automatically control an external program that expects to get terminal input from a human user. Solution When you're running a program that only needs a single strin...

Recipe 23.2. Managing Windows Services Credit: Bill Froelich Problem You want to interact with existing system services on the Windows platform. Solution User the win32-service library, available as the gem of the same name. Its Ser...

Recipe 23.3. Running Code as Another User Problem While writing a Ruby script that runs as root, you need to take some action on behalf of another user: say, run an external program or create a file. Solution Simply set Process.eu...

Recipe 23.4. Running Periodic Tasks Without cron or at Problem You want to write a self-contained Ruby program that performs a task in the background at a certain time, or runs repeatedly at a certain interval. Solution Fork off a ne...

Recipe 23.5. Deleting Files That Match a Regular Expression Credit: Matthew Palmer Problem You have a directory full of files and you need to remove some of them. The patterns you want to match are too complex to represent as file glob...

Recipe 23.6. Renaming Files in Bulk Problem You want to rename a bunch of files programmatically: for instance, to normalize the filename case or to change the extensions. Solution Use the Find module in the Ruby standard library. He...

Recipe 23.7. Finding Duplicate Files Problem You want to find the duplicate files that are taking up all the space on your hard drive. Solution The simple solution is to group the files by size and then by their MD5 checksum. Two ...

Recipe 23.8. Automating Backups Problem You want to make a dated archive of a directory to burn to CD or otherwise store on backup media. Solution This script copies a directory to a timestamped backup. It reuses the File.versioned_ ...

Recipe 23.9. Normalizing Ownership and Permissions in User Directories Problem You want to make make sure your users' home directories don't contain world-writable directories, directories owned by other users, or other potential...