It's all about shells. Get it?
Really, this is just a friendlier wrapper around Open4, because Open4 is pretty bloody great, but feels like a real pain to actually use. Sometimes, it just plain makes more sense to call out to the pipeline than it does to try to use Ruby for shell scripting. When that happes, we use Conchology.
Granted, Conchology doesn't provide the full Open4 API just yet, because we haven't needed it. Instead, we craft the commands that we run through Concholog::Command in a fire-and-forget manner so we don't have to worry about interactive processes.
The Conchology::Command class must be initialized with a string, the command that you want to run in the shell. This can be just about anything, really, but your best bet is to use absolute paths, so on. Here's a crap example:
truecmd = Conchology::Command.new('true')
Once you initialize the command, you can run it, and that will set up the object readers (output, error, and exitstatus).
truecmd.run
truecmd.exitstatus # An integer representing the exit status of the command
truecmd.output # The split(/\n)'d stdpit output of the command
truecmd.error # The split(/\n)'d stderr output of the command
If you attempt to grab info from these readers before you run the command, nothing particularly nasty will happen. The exit status will be -1, and the output and error will both be empty arrays.
But ... what if you don't want to actually instantiate it, but really do want to do as close to a fire-and-forget as you can get without being a negligent admin? Use the class-level run method!
trueresults = Conchology::Command.run('true')
This returns a hash that contains :exitstatus, :output, and :error entries that are as described above.
That's all there is to it right now. Enjoy!