Backquotes
One other type of string deserves a special mention: a string enclosed by backquotes—that is, the inward-pointing quote character that is usually tucked away up toward the top-left corner of the keyboard: `.
Ruby considers anything enclosed by back-quotes to be a command that can be passed for execution by the operating system using a method such as print or puts. By now, you will probably already have guessed that Ruby provides more than one way of doing this. It turns out %x/some command/ has the same effect as `somecommand` and so does %x{some command}. On the Windows operating system, for example, each of the three lines shown next would pass the command dir to the operating system, causing a directory listing to be displayed:
4backquotes.rb ...
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