Ruby in your shell!

Ru brings Ruby's expressiveness, cleanliness, and readability to the command line.

It lets you avoid looking up pesky options in man pages and Googling how to write a transformation in bash that would take you approximately 1s to write in Ruby.

For example, to center a file's lines, use String#center:

ru 'map(:center, 80)' myfile

Using traditional tools, this isn't as easy or readable:

awk 'printf "%" int(40+length($0)/2) "s\n", $0' myfile

For another example, let's compare summing the lines of a list of integers using Ru vs. a traditional approach:

ru 'map(:to_i).sum' myfile

awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}' myfile

Any method from Ruby Core and Active Support can be used. Ru also provides new methods (and modifies #map) to make transformations easier. Here are some variations on the above example:

ru 'map(:to_i, 10).sum' myfile
ru 'map(:to_i).reduce(&:+)' myfile
ru 'each_line.to_i.to_a.sum' myfile
ru 'grep(/^\d+$/).map(:to_i).sum' myfile
ru 'map { |n| n.to_i }.reduce(&:+)' myfile
ru 'reduce(0) { |sum, n| sum + n.to_i }' myfile
ru 'each_line.match(/(\d+)/)[1].to_i.to_a.sum' myfile
ru 'map { |n| n.to_i }.reduce(0) { |sum, n| sum + n }' myfile

See Examples and Methods for more.

gem install ru

You can now use Ruby in your shell!

For example, to sum a list of integers:

$ printf "2\n3" | ru 'map(:to_i).sum'
5

See Examples below, too!

Ru reads from stdin:

$ printf "2\n3" | ru 'map(:to_i).sum'
5
$ cat myfile | ru 'map(:to_i).sum'
5

Or from file(s):

$ ru 'map(:to_i).sum' myfile
5
$ ru 'map(:to_i).sum' myfile myfile
10

You can also run Ruby code without any input by prepending a ! :

$ ru '! 2 + 3'
5

The code argument is run as if it has $stdin.each_line.map(&:chomp). prepended to it. The result is converted to a string and printed. So, if you run ru 'map(&:to_i).sum', you can think of it as running puts $stdin.each_line.map(&:chomp).map(&:to_i).sum.

In addition to the methods provided by Ruby Core and Active Support, Ru provides other methods for performing transformations, like each_line, files, and grep, and it improves map. See Methods for more.

Let's compare the readability and conciseness of Ru relative to existing tools:

ru 'map(:center, 80)' myfile

awk 'printf "%" int(40+length($0)/2) "s\n", $0' myfile

Script

ru 'map(:to_i).sum' myfile

awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}' myfile

paste -s -d+ myfile | bc

ru '[4]' myfile

sed '5q;d' myfile

ru '[1..-2]' myfile

sed '1d;$d' myfile

ru 'map { |line| [line[/(\d+)( ".+"){2}$/, 1].to_i, line] }.sort.reverse.map(:join, " ")' access.log

awk --re-interval '{ match($0, /(([^[:space:]]+|\[[^\]]+\]|"[^"]+")[[:space:]]+){7}/, m); print m[2], $0 }' access.log | sort -nk 1

Source

In addition to the methods provided by Ruby Core and Active Support, Ru provides other methods for performing transformations.

Provides a shorthand for calling methods on each iteration of the input. Best explained by example:

ru 'each_line.strip.center(80)' myfile

If you'd like to transform it back into a list, call to_a:

ru 'each_line.strip.to_a.map(:center, 80)' myfile

Converts the lines to Ru::File objects (see Ru::File below).

$ printf "foo.txt" | ru 'files.map(:updated_at).map(:strftime, ""%Y-%m-%d")'
2014-11-08

Formats a list of Ru::Files. You'll typically call this after calling files to transform them into strings:

$ ru 'files.format'
644	tom	staff	3	2014-10-26	09:06	bar.txt
644	tom	staff	11	2014-11-04	08:29	foo.txt

The default format, 'l', is shown above. It prints [omode, owner, group, size, date, name].

Selects lines which match the given regex.

$ printf "john\npaul\ngeorge" | ru 'grep(/o[h|r]/)'
john
george

This is the same as Array#map, but it adds a new syntax that allows you to easily pass arguments to a method. For example:

$ printf "john\npaul" | ru 'map(:[], 0)'
j
p
$ printf "john\npaul" | ru 'map(:center, 8, ".")'
..john..
..paul..

Note that the examples above can also be performed with each_line:

$ printf "john\npaul" | ru 'each_line[0]'
$ printf "john\npaul" | ru 'each_line.center(8, ".")'

The files method returns an enumerable of Ru::Files, which are similar to Ruby Core's File. Each one has the following methods:

• basename
• created_at (alias for ctime)
• ctime
• extname
• format (see the format method above)
• ftype
• gid
• group
• mode
• mtime
• name (alias for basename)
• omode
• owner
• size
• to_s (alias for name)
• uid
• updated_at (alias for mtime)
• world_readable?

Ru lets you save commands by name, so that you can easily use them later.

Save a command for future use:

$ ru save sum 'map(:to_i).sum'
Saved command: sum is 'map(:to_i).sum'

Run a saved command:

$ printf "2\n3" | ru run sum
5
$ ru run sum myfile
5

List all of your saved commands:

$ ru list
Saved commands:
sum	map(:to_i).sum

Print a help page.

Print the installed version of Ru.

Ru is tested against Active Support 3 and 4. If you'd like to submit a PR, please be sure to use Appraisal to test your changes in both contexts:

appraisal rspec

Ru is released under the MIT License. Please see the MIT-LICENSE file for details.