The Book of Ruby

ensure: Execute Code Whether or Not an Error Occurs

There may be some circumstances in which you want to take some particular action whether or not an exception occurs. For example, whenever you are dealing with some kind of unpredictable input/output—say, when working with files and directories on disk—there is always the possibility that the location (the disk or directory) or the data source (the file) either may not be there at all or may provide some other kinds of problems—such as the disk being full when you attempt to write to it or the file containing the wrong kind of data when you attempt to read from it.

You may need to perform some final “cleanup” procedures whether or not you have encountered any problems, such as logging onto a specific ...