On 6 Mar 2003 at 3:29, Chris Morris wrote:

> From: "Sperberg, Roger" <roger.sperberg / aspenpublishers.com>

> > Can someone advise me of how to find out within my Ruby program what
> drives
> > are on a system, and what type of drive (local hard drive, floppy, CD-ROM,
> > etc.) they are?
> >
> > I'm working with a Win2000 system, but it might also be used by someone
> > running Linux.

> IIRC, I don't think there's a handy cross-platform solution.

And I wouldn't expect to find one, given that Windows and Unix-like 
platforms treat drives very differently. Unix (including Linux) 
doesn't even have a notion of "drives" in the sense that you mean it: 
it provides a unified view of all available storage, wherein various 
storage devices can be attached to the (virtual) filesystem at 
arbitrary points. IMHO, this is very user-friendly--after all, why 
should the user have to worry about *which* hard drive to use? 
Storage is storage is storage. However, a side-effect of this design 
is that if you do need to identify the storage devices, it takes 
significantly more work than it does for Windows.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO USA