Comments of less.rb appreciated

Ruby
1

I’ve had a look at /usr/share/doc/ruby-1.8.4/sample/less.rb and made
some comments on the processes where I could. It came with my repos
installation of Ruby. Can someone point me in the right direction here,
as there a a number of things that I’m not familar with or
understand…

#!/usr/bin/ruby

there isn’t a single def foo … end method here - why?

also how come this hasn’t been turned into a class?

is that because that there is no need for one?

also why the use of GLOBAL VARIABLES? I thought that they are not

from the “church of good design”

gobal vars to hard-code where these programs are… assuming a

Unix-based system # it was weired because the path was initially set
to /usr/local/bin/ # which did not work

i personally think it’s better to use a ruby equivalent of `which

less` to find out where the command is # rather than hard coding it in
this way ZCAT = “/usr/bin/zcat”
LESS = “/usr/bin/less”

funny how you can call ruby less.rb with --help

dunno about this class or method

FILE = ARGV.pop

ah, i think that this may be exception handling.

if no arguments from command line OPTION is zero

otherwise out an empty string at the end of the filename??

OPTION = (if ARGV.length == 0; “” else ARGV.join(" "); end)

we are grepping for stuff…

a file that ends in Z or gz - these are compressed files

if FILE =~ /.(Z|gz)$/

what is %s?

- is it a string that we come across when we are grepping through

the files?

see ri kernel.format for the format method

“Argument is a string to be substituted”

i think it works with sprintf

run zcat on a compressed file first then view it with less

exec(format("%s %s | %s %s", ZCAT, FILE, LESS, OPTION))

otherwise there is no compressed file and we treat it differently

elsif FILE == nil

exec(format("%s %s", LESS, OPTION))
else
print(format("%s %s %s", LESS, OPTION, FILE), “\n”)
exec(format("%s %s %s", LESS, OPTION, FILE))
end

end the lessing. i dont know why the use of the empty brackets

exit()

2

Thanks for that reply. YANGNI’s made my day. I’ll keep things as
simple as poss from now on…

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 10:34:03 +0900 Eric

3

On Feb 25, 2006, at 10:19 AM, John M. wrote:

I’ve had a look at /usr/share/doc/ruby-1.8.4/sample/less.rb and made
some comments on the processes where I could. It came with my repos
installation of Ruby. Can someone point me in the right direction
here,
as there a a number of things that I’m not familar with or
understand…

#!/usr/bin/ruby
there isn’t a single def foo … end method here - why?

YAGNI

also how come this hasn’t been turned into a class?

YAGNI

is that because that there is no need for one?

Yes.

also why the use of GLOBAL VARIABLES? I thought that they are not
from the “church of good design”

There are no global variables in less.rb. Global variables start
with a $.

gobal vars to hard-code where these programs are… assuming a Unix-
based system it was weired because the path was initially set to /
usr/local/bin/ which did not work i personally think it’s better to
use a ruby equivalent of which less to find out where the command
is rather than hard coding it in this way

This is in sample/, so they may or may not work out of the box.
less.rb isn’t installed anywhere on your system, so YMMV.

Also, less.rb won’t work when the PATH env var is empty if you use
which (think cron).

ZCAT = “/usr/bin/zcat”
LESS = “/usr/bin/less”

funny how you can call ruby less.rb with --help

Why? It follows logically from the implementation.

dunno about this class or method

FILE = ARGV.pop

ARGV is the command line argument Array.

ah, i think that this may be exception handling.

if no arguments from command line OPTION is zero

otherwise out an empty string at the end of the filename??

OPTION = (if ARGV.length == 0; “” else ARGV.join(" "); end)

If there are options after removing the filename join them with
spaces. Otherwise use an empty string. No exception handling,
exceptions involve begin/rescue/ensure/raise.

we are grepping for stuff…

matching, not grepping.

a file that ends in Z or gz - these are compressed files

if FILE =~ /.(Z|gz)$/

what is %s?

- is it a string that we come across when we are grepping

through
the files?

The string printf format variable.

see ri kernel.format for the format method

“Argument is a string to be substituted”

i think it works with sprintf

Correct.

run zcat on a compressed file first then view it with less

exec(format(“%s %s | %s %s”, ZCAT, FILE, LESS, OPTION))

otherwise there is no compressed file and we treat it

differently
elsif FILE == nil

exec(format(“%s %s”, LESS, OPTION))

This is why less.rb --help works.

else
print(format(“%s %s %s”, LESS, OPTION, FILE), “\n”)
exec(format(“%s %s %s”, LESS, OPTION, FILE))
end

end the lessing. i dont know why the use of the empty brackets

Differences in style.

exit()

–
Eric H. - [email protected] - http://blog.segment7.net
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