How to run a .rb file from IRB?

Question

I am starting out with Ruby on Rails. I am currently going through a tutorial where it says that I have to run a .rb file from IRB and that that will create a .xml file in my current directory.

My question is how do I run a .rb file in IRB?
And do I have to be in the directory where this .rb file lives when I run it in IRB?

I tried the following: just typing irb on the command line in the directory of the file. That starts an IRB session as far as I understand.
Then I typed irb "filename.rb" which went through but didn't create anything in the current directory but at least it didn't give any errors.

I also tried a whole bunch of other stuff that plain gave me errors. So I don't think I can solve this myself and googling the matter didn't help at all.

I am running Leopard.

Answer 1

You can "run" a file in irb by just requiring or loading it.

$ irb >> load './filename.rb' 

To change your current working directory within irb, you can use FileUtils:

>> require 'fileutils' >> FileUtils.pwd # prints working directory >> FileUtils.cd '/path/to/somewhere' # changes the directory 

Answer 2

In case you want to have your file loaded in the irb session and you are using Ruby 2+ you can load a file in irb like this:

irb -r ./the_name_of_your_file.rb 

This opens an irb session with the given file loaded.

Imagine you have file with a class like this:

class Example   def initialize(name)     @name = name   end    def print__example     p name   end end 

You will be able to use the Example class in the irb session.