Kernel.require behavior

Rails
1

Is it correct that Kernel.require returns (1) true if the file was
successfully required (and wasn’t already loaded), (2) false if it was
successfully required (but was already loaded), or (3) throws a
LoadError if it couldn’t be successfully required.

I claim that the rdoc is misleading and should be corrected as it says:

Kernel#require
require(string) => true or false

 Ruby tries to load the library named _string_, returning +true+ if
 successful. [snip]

which you’d implicitly assume means it returns false if NOT successful,
and it doesn’t say anything at all about a LoadError.

I’ve validated this with a test script but want to make sure there
isn’t some well-known alternate specification or understanding. I’m
researching a potential bug in the RubyGems require mechanism and
making sure I’m rock-solid on this will help.

Test script as:

#!/site/ruby/bin/ruby -w

required = (require ‘pp’)
print “#{required}\n”

required = (require ‘pp’)
print “#{required}\n”

required = (require ‘baz’)
print “#{required}\n”

and output:

[12:07am] lemur:~ > ./test.rb
true
false
./test.rb:9:in `require’: no such file to load – baz (LoadError)
from ./test.rb:9

Thanks,

2

Looks like this is the case. You might want to direct this question at
ruby-talk instead of RoR talk.