14.3. The Shell Library
Ruby isn’t necessarily convenient to use as a scripting language in every situation. For example, a bash script can execute external programs simply by naming them, with no extraneous syntax.
The power and flexibility of Ruby has given it a more complex syntax than the average shell language. Additionally its functionality is segmented into different classes, modules, and libraries.
This situation motivated the creation of the Shell library. This library makes it easier to do things such as connecting commands with pipes and redirecting output to files. It also consolidates functionality from several different sources so that they are transparently accessible from a Shell object. (It doesn’t always work well on Windows.) ...
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