Opener

Opener is a Ruby library for opening things in an cross-platform way.

It is a tiny (33 lines of code) alternative to the launchy library.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'opener'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install opener

Usage

Load this library:

require 'opener'

Open something in the foreground (blocking call):

Opener.system(thing_to_open_in_foreground)

Open something in the background (non-blocking call):

Opener.spawn(thing_to_open_in_background)

Open something in place of the current process:

Opener.exec(thing_to_open_in_place)

Reveal the OS-specific command that is opening things:

puts Opener.command()

Suppression

Open something while detaching terminal (close STDIN):

Opener.system(thing_to_open_in_foreground, 0 => :close)
Opener.spawn(thing_to_open_in_background, 0 => :close)
Opener.exec(thing_to_open_in_place, 0 => :close)

Open something while suppressing output (close STDOUT):

Opener.system(thing_to_open_in_foreground, 1 => :close)
Opener.spawn(thing_to_open_in_background, 1 => :close)
Opener.exec(thing_to_open_in_place, 1 => :close)

Open something while suppressing errors (close STDERR):

Opener.system(thing_to_open_in_foreground, 2 => :close)
Opener.spawn(thing_to_open_in_background, 2 => :close)
Opener.exec(thing_to_open_in_place, 2 => :close)

See Kernel#spawn() documentation for more tips and tricks.

License

This library is distributed under the same terms as Ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/license.txt

Thanks to 2010 David A. Wheeler http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/open-files-urls.html