Tip: Apply many patches to MRI source one liner

First: much praise to Postmodern for ruby-install. Yet another tiny-LOC, ruby ecosystem, wonder tool!

In the past, using ruby-build I would have to work up a "recipe" for a specialized ruby build..

With ruby-install, to apply a patch, you must use the -p option followed by the path to the patch..

What if you need to apply a bunch of patches? No problem. Repeat -p followed by the path to each patch as many times as needed as in

ruby-install -p ~/path_to/patch1 -p ~/path_to/patch2....

Here's the most DRY way to do that I've found using bash parameter substitution:

First collect all the patches you want to apply under one directory, like rvm does and..

pfiles=(~/.rvm/patches/ruby/1.9.3/p385/railsexpress/*); IFS=,; ruby-install -s /tmp -i ~/.rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p385-patched/ "${pfiles[@]/#/-p }" ruby 1.9.3-p385

Beware of patch file names with embedded whitespace. I'd remove it/substitute it out first.