Today Ruby gave me a birthday present: ARGF. If you write a lot of shell scripts you're gonna love it.

To demonstrate we'll write rcat, a dumbed down version of cat(1), in Ruby. But first let's examine some of cat's basic functionality using one.txt and two.txt.

$ echo 'File one!' > one.txt
$ echo 'File two :(' > two.txt

Printing a single file:

$ cat one.txt
File one!

Printing multiple files:

$ cat one.txt two.txt
File one!
File two :(

Mixing files and streams:

$ cat - two.txt < one.txt
File one!
File two :(

Okay. And rcat?

$ rcat one.txt
File one!

$ rcat one.txt two.txt
File one!
File two :(

$ rcat - two.txt < one.txt
File one!
File two :(

Great! So, how's rcat work?

$ rcat rcat
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
puts ARGF.read

Gorgeous. From the docs:

The global constant ARGF (also accessible as $<) provides an IO-like stream which allows access to all files mentioned on the command line (or STDIN if no files are mentioned). ARGF provides the methods #path and #filename to access the name of the file currently being read.

I've just rewritten mustache(1) to use ARGF. Less code, more functionality - what else could you want for your birthday? Thanks Ruby!