I'm trying to open a tmpfile in the system $EDITOR, write to it, and then read in the output. I can get it to work, but I am wondering why calling file.read returns an empty string (when the file does have content)
Basically I'd like to know the correct way of reading the file once it has been written to.
require 'tempfile'
file = Tempfile.new("note")
system("$EDITOR #{file.path}")
file.rewind
puts file.read # this puts out an empty string "" .. why?
puts IO.read(file.path) # this puts out the contents of the file
Yes, I will be running this in an ensure block to nuke the file once used ;)
I was running this on ruby 2.2.2 and using vim.
Make sure you are calling open on the file object before attempting to read it in:
require 'tempfile'
file = Tempfile.new("note")
system("$EDITOR #{file.path}")
file.open
puts file.read
file.close
file.unlink
This will also let you avoid calling rewind on the file, since your process hasn't written any bytes to it at the time you open it.
I believe IO.read will always open the file for you, which is why it worked in that case. Whereas calling .read on an IO-like object does not always open the file for you.
I'm trying to write a program which substitutes a string.
require File.join(APP_ROOT, 'lib', 'main.rb')
files_names = Dir.entries("../DeSpacer")
files_names.each do |file_name|
File.open("#{file_name}", "w") do |text|
text.each {|line| line.gsub!(/\.\s{2,}/, "\.\s")}
end
end
I keep getting a
Permission denied -. (ERRNO::EACCES)
Can you explain what I am doing wrong?
The initial problem is that you're only opening the file for writing ('w'), and not reading, and thus receiving the exception.
As the comments above mention, there are other issues with the code as well.
This answer gives a more typical way to do what you're trying to do.
As mentioned in another answer to the same question, Ruby also has a command line shortcut inherited from Perl which makes things like this trivial:
ruby -pi.bak -e "gsub(/oldtext/, 'newtext')" *.txt
This will edit a file or files in place, backing up the previous version with a suffix of '.bak'.
From Programming Ruby:
-i [extension}
' Edits ARGV files in place. For each file named in ARGV, anything you write to
standard output will be saved back as the contents of that file. A backup copy of
the file will be made if extension is supplied.
% ruby -pi.bak -e "gsub(/Perl/, 'Ruby')" *.txt
I'm trying to create a new file and things don't seem to be working as I expect them too. Here's what I've tried:
File.new "out.txt"
File.open "out.txt"
File.new "out.txt","w"
File.open "out.txt","w"
According to everything I've read online all of those should work but every single one of them gives me this:
ERRNO::ENOENT: No such file or directory - out.txt
This happens from IRB as well as a Ruby script. What am I missing?
Use:
File.open("out.txt", [your-option-string]) {|f| f.write("write your stuff here") }
where your options are:
r - Read only. The file must exist.
w - Create an empty file for writing.
a - Append to a file.The file is created if it does not exist.
r+ - Open a file for update both reading and writing. The file must exist.
w+ - Create an empty file for both reading and writing.
a+ - Open a file for reading and appending. The file is created if it does not exist.
In your case, 'w' is preferable.
OR you could have:
out_file = File.new("out.txt", "w")
#...
out_file.puts("write your stuff here")
#...
out_file.close
Try
File.open("out.txt", "w") do |f|
f.write(data_you_want_to_write)
end
without using the
File.new "out.txt"
Try using "w+" as the write mode instead of just "w":
File.open("out.txt", "w+") { |file| file.write("boo!") }
OK, now I feel stupid. The first two definitely do not work but the second two do. Not sure how I convinced my self that I had tried them. Sorry for wasting everyone's time.
In case this helps anyone else, this can occur when you are trying to make a new file in a directory that does not exist.
If the objective is just to create a file, the most direct way I see is:
FileUtils.touch "foobar.txt"
The directory doesn't exist. Make sure it exists as open won't create those dirs for you.
I ran into this myself a while back.
File.new and File.open default to read mode ('r') as a safety mechanism, to avoid possibly overwriting a file. We have to explicitly tell Ruby to use write mode ('w' is the most common way) if we're going to output to the file.
If the text to be output is a string, rather than write:
File.open('foo.txt', 'w') { |fo| fo.puts "bar" }
or worse:
fo = File.open('foo.txt', 'w')
fo.puts "bar"
fo.close
Use the more succinct write:
File.write('foo.txt', 'bar')
write has modes allowed so we can use 'w', 'a', 'r+' if necessary.
open with a block is useful if you have to compute the output in an iterative loop and want to leave the file open as you do so. write is useful if you are going to output the content in one blast then close the file.
See the documentation for more information.
data = 'data you want inside the file'.
You can use File.write('name of file here', data)
You can also use constants instead of strings to specify the mode you want. The benefit is if you make a typo in a constant name, your program will raise an runtime exception.
The constants are File::RDONLY or File::WRONLY or File::CREAT. You can also combine them if you like.
Full description of file open modes on ruby-doc.org
How can I get the path for the last created file in a directory using Ruby?
I think this is fairly brief:
Dir.glob(File.join(path, '*.*')).max { |a,b| File.ctime(a) <=> File.ctime(b) }
Dir.entries("testdir").reject{|f| f== '.' || f=='..'}.sort_by{|f| File.ctime(f)}.last
you can use the dir class to list all files and check the ctime or atime of the file object (ctime is the time the file was changed the last time, atime is the time the file was accessed the last time)
Dir.foreach("testdir") {|f| puts File.ctime(x) }
Dir.glob(root_path + ".").map{ |file| [file,File.ctime(file)]}.max.first
I added this method to my supermanpatches.rb file inside of railsapp/config/initializers to open my latest generated migration (in TextMate) without having to copy and paste the filename or anything like that:
def latestmigration
`mate db/migrate/#{Dir.glob(File.join(Rails.root, 'db', 'migrate', '*.rb')).max { |a,b| File.ctime(a) <=> File.ctime(b)} }`
end
‡: (FYI for ruby/rails beginners, initializer code is omnipresent and requires no class-to-filename scoping to be accessible from anywhere within rails)
NOTE: With windows (or mac) you could use the vim command instead of the mate command, and sublimetext can be configured to do this too, I think its called the subl command. mate & subl don't work by default though I think, so you have to set that up first
I'm looking for a script to search a file (or list of files) for a pattern and, if found, replace that pattern with a given value.
Thoughts?
Disclaimer: This approach is a naive illustration of Ruby's capabilities, and not a production-grade solution for replacing strings in files. It's prone to various failure scenarios, such as data loss in case of a crash, interrupt, or disk being full. This code is not fit for anything beyond a quick one-off script where all the data is backed up. For that reason, do NOT copy this code into your programs.
Here's a quick short way to do it.
file_names = ['foo.txt', 'bar.txt']
file_names.each do |file_name|
text = File.read(file_name)
new_contents = text.gsub(/search_regexp/, "replacement string")
# To merely print the contents of the file, use:
puts new_contents
# To write changes to the file, use:
File.open(file_name, "w") {|file| file.puts new_contents }
end
Actually, Ruby does have an in-place editing feature. Like Perl, you can say
ruby -pi.bak -e "gsub(/oldtext/, 'newtext')" *.txt
This will apply the code in double-quotes to all files in the current directory whose names end with ".txt". Backup copies of edited files will be created with a ".bak" extension ("foobar.txt.bak" I think).
NOTE: this does not appear to work for multiline searches. For those, you have to do it the other less pretty way, with a wrapper script around the regex.
Keep in mind that, when you do this, the filesystem could be out of space and you may create a zero-length file. This is catastrophic if you're doing something like writing out /etc/passwd files as part of system configuration management.
Note that in-place file editing like in the accepted answer will always truncate the file and write out the new file sequentially. There will always be a race condition where concurrent readers will see a truncated file. If the process is aborted for any reason (ctrl-c, OOM killer, system crash, power outage, etc) during the write then the truncated file will also be left over, which can be catastrophic. This is the kind of dataloss scenario which developers MUST consider because it will happen. For that reason, I think the accepted answer should most likely not be the accepted answer. At a bare minimum write to a tempfile and move/rename the file into place like the "simple" solution at the end of this answer.
You need to use an algorithm that:
Reads the old file and writes out to the new file. (You need to be careful about slurping entire files into memory).
Explicitly closes the new temporary file, which is where you may throw an exception because the file buffers cannot be written to disk because there is no space. (Catch this and cleanup the temporary file if you like, but you need to rethrow something or fail fairly hard at this point.
Fixes the file permissions and modes on the new file.
Renames the new file and drops it into place.
With ext3 filesystems you are guaranteed that the metadata write to move the file into place will not get rearranged by the filesystem and written before the data buffers for the new file are written, so this should either succeed or fail. The ext4 filesystem has also been patched to support this kind of behavior. If you are very paranoid you should call the fdatasync() system call as a step 3.5 before moving the file into place.
Regardless of language, this is best practice. In languages where calling close() does not throw an exception (Perl or C) you must explicitly check the return of close() and throw an exception if it fails.
The suggestion above to simply slurp the file into memory, manipulate it and write it out to the file will be guaranteed to produce zero-length files on a full filesystem. You need to always use FileUtils.mv to move a fully-written temporary file into place.
A final consideration is the placement of the temporary file. If you open a file in /tmp then you have to consider a few problems:
If /tmp is mounted on a different file system you may run /tmp out of space before you've written out the file that would otherwise be deployable to the destination of the old file.
Probably more importantly, when you try to mv the file across a device mount you will transparently get converted to cp behavior. The old file will be opened, the old files inode will be preserved and reopened and the file contents will be copied. This is most likely not what you want, and you may run into "text file busy" errors if you try to edit the contents of a running file. This also defeats the purpose of using the filesystem mv commands and you may run the destination filesystem out of space with only a partially written file.
This also has nothing to do with Ruby's implementation. The system mv and cp commands behave similarly.
What is more preferable is to open a Tempfile in the same directory as the old file. This ensures that there will be no cross-device move issues. The mv itself should never fail, and you should always get a complete and untruncated file. Any failures, such as device out of space, permission errors, etc., should be encountered during writing the Tempfile out.
The only downsides to the approach of creating the Tempfile in the destination directory are:
Sometimes you may not be able to open a Tempfile there, such as if you are trying to 'edit' a file in /proc for example. For that reason you might want to fall back and try /tmp if opening the file in the destination directory fails.
You must have enough space on the destination partition in order to hold both the complete old file and the new file. However, if you have insufficient space to hold both copies then you are probably short on disk space and the actual risk of writing a truncated file is much higher, so I would argue this is a very poor tradeoff outside of some exceedingly narrow (and well-monitored) edge cases.
Here's some code that implements the full-algorithm (windows code is untested and unfinished):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'tempfile'
def file_edit(filename, regexp, replacement)
tempdir = File.dirname(filename)
tempprefix = File.basename(filename)
tempprefix.prepend('.') unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin|mingw|windows/
tempfile =
begin
Tempfile.new(tempprefix, tempdir)
rescue
Tempfile.new(tempprefix)
end
File.open(filename).each do |line|
tempfile.puts line.gsub(regexp, replacement)
end
tempfile.fdatasync unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin|mingw|windows/
tempfile.close
unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin|mingw|windows/
stat = File.stat(filename)
FileUtils.chown stat.uid, stat.gid, tempfile.path
FileUtils.chmod stat.mode, tempfile.path
else
# FIXME: apply perms on windows
end
FileUtils.mv tempfile.path, filename
end
file_edit('/tmp/foo', /foo/, "baz")
And here is a slightly tighter version that doesn't worry about every possible edge case (if you are on Unix and don't care about writing to /proc):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'tempfile'
def file_edit(filename, regexp, replacement)
Tempfile.open(".#{File.basename(filename)}", File.dirname(filename)) do |tempfile|
File.open(filename).each do |line|
tempfile.puts line.gsub(regexp, replacement)
end
tempfile.fdatasync
tempfile.close
stat = File.stat(filename)
FileUtils.chown stat.uid, stat.gid, tempfile.path
FileUtils.chmod stat.mode, tempfile.path
FileUtils.mv tempfile.path, filename
end
end
file_edit('/tmp/foo', /foo/, "baz")
The really simple use-case, for when you don't care about file system permissions (either you're not running as root, or you're running as root and the file is root owned):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'tempfile'
def file_edit(filename, regexp, replacement)
Tempfile.open(".#{File.basename(filename)}", File.dirname(filename)) do |tempfile|
File.open(filename).each do |line|
tempfile.puts line.gsub(regexp, replacement)
end
tempfile.close
FileUtils.mv tempfile.path, filename
end
end
file_edit('/tmp/foo', /foo/, "baz")
TL;DR: That should be used instead of the accepted answer at a minimum, in all cases, in order to ensure the update is atomic and concurrent readers will not see truncated files. As I mentioned above, creating the Tempfile in the same directory as the edited file is important here to avoid cross device mv operations being translated into cp operations if /tmp is mounted on a different device. Calling fdatasync is an added layer of paranoia, but it will incur a performance hit, so I omitted it from this example since it is not commonly practiced.
There isn't really a way to edit files in-place. What you usually do when you can get away with it (i.e. if the files are not too big) is, you read the file into memory (File.read), perform your substitutions on the read string (String#gsub) and then write the changed string back to the file (File.open, File#write).
If the files are big enough for that to be unfeasible, what you need to do, is read the file in chunks (if the pattern you want to replace won't span multiple lines then one chunk usually means one line - you can use File.foreach to read a file line by line), and for each chunk perform the substitution on it and append it to a temporary file. When you're done iterating over the source file, you close it and use FileUtils.mv to overwrite it with the temporary file.
Another approach is to use inplace editing inside Ruby (not from the command line):
#!/usr/bin/ruby
def inplace_edit(file, bak, &block)
old_stdout = $stdout
argf = ARGF.clone
argf.argv.replace [file]
argf.inplace_mode = bak
argf.each_line do |line|
yield line
end
argf.close
$stdout = old_stdout
end
inplace_edit 'test.txt', '.bak' do |line|
line = line.gsub(/search1/,"replace1")
line = line.gsub(/search2/,"replace2")
print line unless line.match(/something/)
end
If you don't want to create a backup then change '.bak' to ''.
This works for me:
filename = "foo"
text = File.read(filename)
content = text.gsub(/search_regexp/, "replacestring")
File.open(filename, "w") { |file| file << content }
Here's a solution for find/replace in all files of a given directory. Basically I took the answer provided by sepp2k and expanded it.
# First set the files to search/replace in
files = Dir.glob("/PATH/*")
# Then set the variables for find/replace
#original_string_or_regex = /REGEX/
#replacement_string = "STRING"
files.each do |file_name|
text = File.read(file_name)
replace = text.gsub!(#original_string_or_regex, #replacement_string)
File.open(file_name, "w") { |file| file.puts replace }
end
require 'trollop'
opts = Trollop::options do
opt :output, "Output file", :type => String
opt :input, "Input file", :type => String
opt :ss, "String to search", :type => String
opt :rs, "String to replace", :type => String
end
text = File.read(opts.input)
text.gsub!(opts.ss, opts.rs)
File.open(opts.output, 'w') { |f| f.write(text) }
If you need to do substitutions across line boundaries, then using ruby -pi -e won't work because the p processes one line at a time. Instead, I recommend the following, although it could fail with a multi-GB file:
ruby -e "file='translation.ja.yml'; IO.write(file, (IO.read(file).gsub(/\s+'$/, %q('))))"
The is looking for white space (potentially including new lines) following by a quote, in which case it gets rid of the whitespace. The %q(')is just a fancy way of quoting the quote character.
Here an alternative to the one liner from jim, this time in a script
ARGV[0..-3].each{|f| File.write(f, File.read(f).gsub(ARGV[-2],ARGV[-1]))}
Save it in a script, eg replace.rb
You start in on the command line with
replace.rb *.txt <string_to_replace> <replacement>
*.txt can be replaced with another selection or with some filenames or paths
broken down so that I can explain what's happening but still executable
# ARGV is an array of the arguments passed to the script.
ARGV[0..-3].each do |f| # enumerate the arguments of this script from the first to the last (-1) minus 2
File.write(f, # open the argument (= filename) for writing
File.read(f) # open the argument (= filename) for reading
.gsub(ARGV[-2],ARGV[-1])) # and replace all occurances of the beforelast with the last argument (string)
end
EDIT: if you want to use a regular expression use this instead
Obviously, this is only for handling relatively small text files, no Gigabyte monsters
ARGV[0..-3].each{|f| File.write(f, File.read(f).gsub(/#{ARGV[-2]}/,ARGV[-1]))}
I am using the tty-file gem
Apart from replacing, it includes append, prepend (on a given text/regex inside the file), diff, and others.