Whoops, wrong version........... I have a couple of ruby "programs" (embedded in ksh functions) that do almost the same thing....

   ruby <<'!*'
      class String
         def comment?
            self =~ /^(#| *$)/
         end
      end

      File.open(ENV["ORACONF"]) { |conf|
         conf.readlines.each { |line|
            next if comment?

            line.chomp!

            instance, days, cm, backup = line.split(":")
            if ((line =~ /^#{ENV["INST"]}/) && (cm == "Y")) then
               exit(1)
               end
            }
         }
!*

>>> Dave Thomas <Dave / thomases.com> 03/15/00 03:50PM >>>
"David Douthitt" <DDouthitt / cuna.com> writes:

> Why not use this pattern substitution (instead of gsub! and yield) -
> 
> line = s/[ \t]*#.*$//;
> next if /^$/;
> 
> Not sure how that translates to Ruby....

The s/// is a sub(/\s*#.*/, '').

The only reason for the separate method is reusability: the next time
you need to read an Oracle configuration or whatever you've got the
useful configReader method in your toolkit.

> Here's the entire code, including invocation from ksh:

I just ran this without error on my box. However, wasn;t it the
version with comment? that was giving you a problem?



Regards


Dave