Sometimes I feel like I forget the utility of the Ruby language. Part of the reason is how I use it so much via Rails. Ruby is a almost perfect scripting language, once you should reach for when performing everyday programming tasks.
There are many, many articles on this subject, and we’ve had a few more recently on SitePoint. My question today is: How have you used Ruby as a tool?
I’d love to build a thread of quick-hitting, useful Ruby examples so we never forget how utilitarian Ruby can be.
I use it for loads of stuff unrelated to Rails.
For example I wrote a small script to recurse through a directory tree, open text files (based on the extension) and perform a find and replace on the contents. This proves useful when I have to change something globally on one of the static websites I look after (i.e. one which wasn’t built using a CMS).
I also wrote a static website generator in Ruby, as well as a GUI editor to allow our secretary to update an events plan on our webpage.
Nice @Pullo…have you considered releasing this stuff to the community?
I never really thought about it to be honest. I’ve nothing against doing so, but it’d probably take some time to get it in a state that other people might find useful.
Thinking about it, I also wrote a GUI password generator which will generate you a secure password on demand.
This people can read about: http://www.sitepoint.com/an-introduction-to-fxruby/ (although it appears that something hideous has happened to the code formatting).
Edit: I fixed the code highlighting and stuck the code on GitHub.
I find Ruby to be my “Go To” [scripting] language when I need to accomplish a task that:
If this is likely to be a “one-of” task I will trudge through it with sed, awk and/or vi. But Ruby is often just plain fun to use. And it provides the additiona benefit that - among my colleagues - I am percieved as a sort of “wizard” for using the hip-new-tools from the Open Source world (we are a very stoic [e.g. US Government] organization).
Yeah, Ruby is my first option when building simple cli utilities like parallel git pull, calendar events or hours duration summing. When I have time I try to rewrite those tools in Rust to gain super-speed. 
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