ara.t.howard / noaa.gov wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Ernest Obusek wrote:
> 
>> #!/usr/bin/ruby
>>
>> puts "Timer set to #{ARGV[0]} seconds.  Press <ENTER> to start the 
>> countdown."
>> gets
>>
>> It seems to think the argument of 60 should be a file or directory...  
>> ????
> 
> you have not given a receiver to gets and the default one is ARGF (see 
> pickaxe for desc).  try
> 
>   STDIN.gets
> 
That almost makes sense, except for the name of the receiver.
gets is supposed to read from a file, if specified. Otherwise
it reads from piped input (according to the ancient books I've
consulted).

I can understand that you would need to specify a different
receiver to specify "current console device". But surely
the input pipe is standard input, yes? So STDIN is the current
console device, and that's not the same as standard in???

Signed, Confused in Peoria.
:_)