Sheller

A friendly toolbox or Ruby / Shell interactions

Sheller offers a unified interface for Ruby interaction with the shell environment and seeks to ease a few common pains.

• Easy access to STDOUT, STDERR, and exit status
• Execution with shell-safe quoting
• Exciting pipe operators
• Shell-safe quotation helpers to use however you like

Don't fumble around with streams

> require 'sheller'
> Sheller.execute('cat', '/usr/share/dict/propernames').stdout.shuffle[0..5]
 => ["Dennis", "Turkeer", "Ahmed", "Rob", "Spyros", "Mott"]

> Sheller.execute('grep', '*', 'foo').stderr
 => "grep: foo: No such file or directory\n"

> Sheller.execute('date', '-r', 'ten').exit_status.to_i
 => 256

Automatically sanitize arguments

Sheller.execute('convert',
  attachment.filename,
  '--resize', '10x10',
  thumbnail_filename) 

Pipe and Redirect

Sheller.execute('cal', :|, 'grep', 9)                # Pipe with the symbol :|

Sheller.execute('echo', 'Frogs', :>, 'frogs.txt')    # Redirect with the symbol :>

Advanced Piping

Sheller.execute('find', '/',
  '-name', filename,
  :'2>&1')

Or use these more recognizable names

Sheller.execute('find', '/',
  '-name', filename,
  Sheller::STDERR_TO_STDOUT)

Convenient, Shell-oriented Quoting

> Sheller.quote('echo')
=> "'echo'"

> Sheller.quote('~/private/My "so-called" friends')
=> "'~/private/My \"so-called\" friends'"