How can I run a ruby program as its own command?

Question

It is possible to put the #!/usr/bin/env ruby at the top and run chmod +x myProgram.rb to run it from the terminal by doing something like ./myProgram.rb.

This requires the path to the .rb file. I am trying to run the program by just typing myProgram into a terminal.

Make it executable and put it somewhere in your $PATH (the usual place is /usr/local/bin). — matt
– matt, Commented Oct 4, 2018 at 0:04
The default .bashrc on some linux distros also adds $HOME/bin to the path if it exists. I normally symlink things into it. — Chris Hall
– Chris Hall, Commented Oct 4, 2018 at 1:42

Andrew Schwartz · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-04 16:08:58Z

1

Adding an alternative that I tend to prefer. Instead of balooning my PATH variable, I put a single folder such as ~/bin in my PATH. Then I create symlinks from here to any executables I have in odd locations. E.g. ln -s /path/to/myProgram.rb ~/bin/myProgram.rb

edited Oct 4, 2018 at 16:08

answered Oct 4, 2018 at 3:34

Andrew Schwartz

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4 Comments

Peter Mellett Over a year ago

I have a dir like this for little scripts and things I have written over time. These are mostly ruby and with the #! and executable you can also omit the .rb

Andrew Schwartz Over a year ago

Personal preference, I like to keep the file extensions :-)

Mining15 Over a year ago

@AndrewSchwartz When I run ln -s ~/bin/myProgram.rb /path/to/myProgram.rb, it gives me an error ln: ~/bin/myProgram.rb: File exists, but when I go into ~/bin, there isn't anything named myProgram.rb

Andrew Schwartz Over a year ago

@Mining15 I got it backwards, it's ln -s existing_file new_link_file. Updated my response to reflect this.

Jamie Clinton · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-04 00:04:31Z

0

You need to add the directory to the PATH variable. When you type a command in *nix, it tries to look up the command in all the directories in PATH.

Here is a random article explaning how https://opensource.com/article/17/6/set-path-linux.

answered Oct 4, 2018 at 0:04

Jamie Clinton

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