Rake task with arguments

Ruby
1

I found an example (http://www.betweentherails.com/rake/) of passing
arguments to a rake task in the new (0.8.n) version of rake. From this
example, I created the following test:

namespace :foo do
desc ‘lol’
task :bar, :num do |t, args|
puts “num = #{args.num}”
end
end

I took a look at the task list:

$ rake --tasks
(in /path/to/my/dir)
rake foo:bar[num] # lol

All looks well … until I try to run it:

$ rake foo:bar[123]
rake: No match

Hmm … let’s try without the argument:

$ rake foo:bar
(in /path/to/my/dir)
num =

o.O

2

On Feb 25, 2:39 pm, Reacher [email protected] wrote:

Hmm … let’s try without the argument:

$ rake foo:bar
(in /path/to/my/dir)
num =

o.O

I figured it out

$ rake foo:bar[123]
(in /path/to/my/dir)
num = 123

BTW, csh is evil

3

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 05:39:57AM +0900, Reacher wrote:

All looks well … until I try to run it:

$ rake foo:bar[123]
rake: No match

Try this instead:

$ rake ‘foo:bar[123]’

The shell is interpreting the []'s as globbing metacharacters. You have
to
quote them so the shell passes them to ruby as-is.

4

Jos B. wrote:

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 05:39:57AM +0900, Reacher wrote:

All looks well … until I try to run it:

$ rake foo:bar[123]
rake: No match

Try this instead:

$ rake ‘foo:bar[123]’

Yuck.

FWIW, you can also embed arguments in the task name, which makes the
command line cleaner. This is yucky in its own special way.

$ cat rakefile
foo_task_pat = /^foo(\w+)$/

make_foo_dep_name =
proc do |taskname|
“foo/#{taskname[foo_task_pat, 1]}”
end

rule foo_task_pat => make_foo_dep_name do |t|
puts “handling rule for #{t.name.inspect}”
end

directory “foo”

file “foo/bar” => “foo” do
system “touch foo/bar”
end
$ rm -rf foo
$ rake foobar
(in /home/vjoel/ruby/misc/rake/args)
handling rule for “foobar”
$ ls foo
bar

5

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 06:07:38AM +0900, Joel VanderWerf wrote:

Jos B. wrote:

$ rake ‘foo:bar[123]’

Yuck.

Hey, using []'s in rake wasn’t my idea…

6

On Feb 25, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Reacher wrote:

I figured it out

$ rake foo:bar[123]
(in /path/to/my/dir)
num = 123

BTW, csh is evil

Of course csh is evil! That’s nothing new.
http://ooblick.com/text/CshProgrammingConsideredHarmful.html

This works just fine with bash:

rab://tmp $ cat Rakefile
namespace :foo do
desc ‘lol’
task :bar, :num do |t, args|
puts “num = #{args.num}”
end
end
rab://tmp $ rake foo:bar[123]
(in /private/tmp)
num = 123

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

7

On Feb 25, 3:44 pm, Rob B. [email protected]
wrote:

Of course csh is evil! That’s nothing new.http://ooblick.com/text/CshProgrammingConsideredHarmful.html
rab://tmp $ rake foo:bar[123]
(in /private/tmp)
num = 123

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

When I got my first real job programming, I had no experience with
*NIX … at all. The shell we worked in was tcsh. Currently, everyone
in our office uses ksh, but I’ve been slow to conform, since I’m used
to tcsh and it’s few but handy niceties. I think the results of this
thread may be the poke needed to move to bash.

8

Reacher wrote:

Currently, everyone
in our office uses ksh, but I’ve been slow to conform, since I’m used
to tcsh and it’s few but handy niceties. I think the results of this
thread may be the poke needed to move to bash.

Skip bash and go to straight to zsh. You won’t regret it.