Sending files over a network

Ruby
1

Hi All,

I am relatively new to Ruby and I am considering using it for a little
itch of my own I want to scratch. It deals with sending files over a
network, but in a one-computer-to-one-computer way, not swarming like
with torrents.

My question is two-fold: What is, in general, the better way of sending
files across a network like this. By better I mean appropriate for
files that may be both very long and very short? Some error checking
also needs to be done so the files don’t corrupt. I realise this is not
really ruby specific, but bear with me please.

How would you do/implement this in Ruby? If I was more familiar with
either Ruby or network programming I could probably bootstrap my
knowledge, but it seems I just don’t know enough.

Regards,
Pieter Breed

2

Pieter Breed wrote:

Hi All,

I am relatively new to Ruby and I am considering using it for a little
itch of my own I want to scratch. It deals with sending files over a
network, but in a one-computer-to-one-computer way, not swarming like
with torrents.

why not useing ftp?

My question is two-fold: What is, in general, the better way of sending
files across a network like this. By better I mean appropriate for
files that may be both very long and very short? Some error checking
also needs to be done so the files don’t corrupt. I realise this is not
really ruby specific, but bear with me please.

How would you do/implement this in Ruby?

u dont need to, its been done for you before, lots fo times, just find
one implementation that suits your needs, and stick to it.

3

Uhm, thanks… I didn’t think of that…

actually I really meant to ask what I asked in the first place… Sorry
for being bitchy, but I your answer was kind of silly.

Pieter

4

On Sun, 2 Apr 2006, Pieter Breed wrote:

Uhm, thanks… I didn’t think of that…

actually I really meant to ask what I asked in the first place… Sorry
for being bitchy, but I your answer was kind of silly.

Pieter

check out ruby-sendfile - you’ll have a tough time getting faster.

regards.

-a

5

Thanks Konstantin, that is really helpful and I will give it a bash

Regards,
Pieter

6

If you know how to work with files, and how to set up connections
(TCPServer/TCPSocket) you know enough to send a file over network with
Ruby. Performance will be network-limited, so don’t worry too much
about it.

You can use MD5/SHA1 for additional error checking, for error checking,
tough TCP has this feature on its own.

pseudocode ( as in - not tested but with a couple of fixes should
probably work )

  • sender:
    name=“file.txt”; len = File.new(name).stat.size.to_s
    socket = TCPSocket.new(‘remote.host.org’, 6666)
    socket.puts name
    socket.pits.len
    socket.write File.read(name)
    socket.close

  • reciever:
    socket = TCPServer.new(‘0.0.0.0’, 6666).accept
    name = socket.gets
    len = socket.gets
    File.open(name, “wb”) { | fl | fl.write (socket.read len.to_i ) }
    socket.close

HTH

7

btw, depending on your requirements you might want to have a look at
http://rio.rubyforge.org/ -
it gives IO, File, Dir and sevral others a simple consistent interface

  • in case you want to work with directories and files and a lot