What's the most elegant way to check for the existence of a command line tool on the system from Ruby?

Question

For reference, the Bash equivalents are discussed here: Check if a program exists from a Bash script

I've been doing something like

if `which commandname` =~ /commandname/
  # do stuff
end

but I'm wondering if there is something a little cleaner.

Just invoke the command, and catch the exception raised if the command doesn't exist. — user229044, Jun 11 '14 at 14:19

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '14 at 14:47

2

system("ls")
#=> true

system("ls wrong params")
#=> false

system("lss")
#=> nil

if system("your cmd")
  puts "yey!"
else
  puts "oups"
end

answered Jun 11 '14 at 14:47

fl00r

1 Answers1