Malte Milatz
1/14/2006 10:38:00 AM
Donkey Agony:
> Apologies for such a noob question, but what are the differences betweeen
> ARGF, $stdin, $*, and $<?
STDIN or $stdin is the so-called standard input.
ARGF or $< gives you the content of the files specified on the command line
or, if there aren't any, of standard input.
ARGV or $* gives you the command line arguments as strings.
As an example, take this invocation of a Ruby script (on a Unix-like
system - I don't know whether `echo` is available on Windows systems):
echo "Hi." | ruby test.rb testfile
ARGV will be [ "testfile" ].
$stdin.read will give you "Hi.\n".
ARGF.read will give you the contents of testfile.
Other people may give you more detailed information...
Malte