On 10/5/06, Tom Allison <tallison / tacocat.net> wrote:
> Found a buddy who used something like:
>
> hostname = open("|hostname").gets
>
> And...
>
> I see that it works, but I don't find any of the documentation that makes sense.
>
> So -- it seems to be IO class, but how?  There's no IO declaration there.
> Also, I can't find anything that says you can open a command with a preceding
> pipe and get the output of the executed command.
>
> I'm familiar with perls open: open(FH, "hostname |") with a suffixed pipe --
> which is consistent with unix pipe usage.
>
> But can someone explain to me what's going on here so my brain doesn't implode?
>

http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Kernel.html#M001989