The command "ruby" does nothing on my Mac

Question

I can't get the Ruby interpreter to run on either of my Macs (one MacBook and one MacBook Pro, both running Snow Leopard). When I run it, by typing ruby in Terminal, nothing happens. It just sits there. I can kill it by pressing Ctrl+C, but that's it. I know the Ruby process is running, since I can see it in Activity Monitor, and running ruby --version works fine.

I have tried the following, all to no avail:

1. I have some bash customizations, so I tried disabling them, but that didn't help.
2. I installed a new copy of Ruby 1.8.7 using MacPorts, but that one had the same problem.
3. I tried quitting and restarting the Terminal application.

Some other information that might be useful:

• I'm trying to run the version of Ruby that comes with Snow Leopard.
• I have installed Apple's developer tools.
• Other interpreters (Python, Io, etc.) work fine.

I spent a while tonight searching for this problem online, but haven't found any discussion of it. I'm at a loss for what could be causing it, so any help anybody can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Ruby command itself will just behave the way you said, either provide it with script file or use the -e option:

ruby -e ' puts "hello world" '

However I suspect that you want the IRB(interactive ruby). Run irb in your shell.