I wrote a script literally two hours ago that needed to shell out to a sub-process. I ended up using IO.popen, which I assume you'll be getting to in the next article.

I wanted to add, one pain point of the backtick operator (and probably system method) is that your input needs to escape special shell characters like quotes. I've seen errors when input is not properly escaped.

Thanks for the post! Looking forward to the next article!

j o e @ f a i t h f u l g e e k . o r g; thanks man!