put exec output in a variable

Question

I am new to ruby and trying to do some command line stuff.

Now I need to save the output of

exec 'cat /etc/system-release'

in a variable to scan it for a number.

Frederick Cheung · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-07 20:18:45Z

2

If you want to grab the output you're better off using system or backticks (or for longer running tasks, IO.popen)

In this case, it would be a lot faster to do

File.read('/etc/system-release')

rather than creating extra processes just to do this.

answered Jul 7, 2012 at 20:18

Frederick Cheung

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1 Comment

Thanks a lot for formatting and the hints. I will use File.read now :)