How to determine which file a method is defined in

Ruby
1

I would like to know if there is a way to definitively tell which file a
given method was defined in.

Basically I’m trying to understand what a method does and would like to
look in the file that defines it to better understand it. I’ve got IRB
running and I’d like to do something like:

self.method(“find”).inspect

but this doesn’t exactly tell me where the method is defined so I can’t
go figure exactly what it does.

thx!

2

On 8/1/07, Fenton T. [email protected] wrote:

I would like to know if there is a way to definitively tell which file a
given method was defined in.

The simplest solution would be to use grep on the .rb files that you
are requiring into your irb session. From a command prompt …

grep ‘def find’ find . -name '*.rb'

If that does not work for you, then you can set the SCRIPT_LINES__
constant to capture the source code read in by the ruby interpreter
when require is called. There is an example in the second version of
the pickaxe book (page 528).

Blessings,
TwP

3

Hi,

You might also want to try http://unroller.rubyforge.org/

George