Ruby Scripting Extensions

Some extensions to make ruby shell scripting easier.

Installation

Torch is available at rubygems.

gem install torch

Usage

To enable the extensions, simply require 'torch' at the top of your file.

Examples

Below are some basic examples of torch. More examples can be found in the Examples directory.

Command line arguments

There are several ways to see the command line flags depending on what you are trying to do. Here are examples of various methods available for a program invoked with the arguments -v -xzf red.tgz:

ARGV                           => ["-v", "-xzf", "red.tgz"]
ARGV.flags                     => ["v", "x", "z", "f"]

To test presence of an argument:

ARGV.flags.include?(:v)        => true
ARGV.flags._v?                 => true
ARGV.flags.include?(:env)      => false
ARGV.flags._env?               => false

Notice that you can use _opt? as a shortcut to include?. The _ is to prevent conflicts with built in methods. If your flag names are too complex to be accessed as a method, you can still use include? string:

ARGV.flags.include?('complex-fl@g')      => false

You can get arguments to an option by treating ARGV as a hash:

ARGV[:env]                     => nil
ARGV[:v]                       => nil
ARGV[:x]                       => "red.tgz"
ARGV[:z]                       => "red.tgz"
ARGV[:f]                       => "red.tgz"

Notice that since we passed -xzf red.tgz, we show "red.tgz" as the argument to x, z, and f. It is up to your program to decide how to handle that.

You can access a list of arguments without flags by calling the args method:

ARGV.args                      => ["red.tgz"]

Currently, option arguments (like "red.tgz") will be in this list. That is because Torch doesn't know whether you meant a given flag to take an arg.