Executing shell script commands in Ruby script

Question

I have a very basic question. I'm running a Ruby script to access the contents of a directory in Linux. The directory is passed through the command line when the ruby script is executed.

My question is how would I use the command line argument in the command for ruby?

I have it set like such:

usrDirectory = ARGV[0]
lsCmd = `ls -l`

I need to use something like ls -l usrDirectory. Could I just insert it into the command like is?

Answer 1

The above is right, and if you want to have ls output to standard out, this makes it a little cleaner:

system("ls", "-l", dir)

This will make Ruby print the output to your standard out instead of putting the output in the variable as the above does.