I''ll keep that 'failing silently' in mind.  BTW, it WAS copy/pasted,  
and that particular one prompt code was the most complicated one I  
saw.  I chose it after getting frustrated with a few other ones that  
didn't work.  And if I had looked at it a little closer, I should have  
caught the missing second curly brace.  It works though....

also, OS X is supposed to look for the /etc/irbrc file LAST, after  
looking through a few different spellings of /.irbrc.  I still don't  
understand what happened, but the problem's solved, and I'll continue  
the trek.

thanks all for your know-how.

mac


On Feb 19, 2009, at 12:32 PM, Ben Bleything wrote:
>
>> I'm still wondering why it didn't load up automatically.  Is it  
>> supposed to?
>> All the info I read about .irbrc said that when irb is loading, it  
>> looks
>> for those files automatically.  What's up?
>
> If what Robert suggested worked, then it *is* reading your .irbrc when
> loading up.
>
> Here's what you said you put in your ~/.irbrc in your original  
> message:
>
>  IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE][:DEFAULT] = {:PROMPT_I => "%N(%m):%03n:%i>
>                                       end
>
> I can see a couple of problems here.  It's possible that they're
> copy/paste errors, but A) there's an opening curly brace right after
> the first = and no closing curly and B) what's that end about?
>
> If your ~/.irbrc is invalid, it will fail silently.  My guess would be
> that it reads /etc/irbrc first, then ~/.irbrc, so if there's a problem
> with your ~/.irbrc, it would seem that it's not loading.
>
> Hope that helps :)
>
> Ben
>