Interactive Ruby Shell

Interactive Ruby Shell
Developer(s) Keiju Ishitsuka
Stable release
0.9.6 / June 30, 2009 (2009-06-30)
Written in Ruby
Operating system Cross-platform
Platform Ruby interpreter
Type Ruby shell
License Ruby License
BSD License
Website www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Interactive Ruby Shell (IRB or irb) is a REPL for programming in the object-oriented scripting language Ruby. The abbreviation irb comes from the fact that the filename extension for Ruby is ".rb", although interactive Ruby files do not have an extension of ".irb". The program is launched from a command line and allows the execution of Ruby commands with immediate response, experimenting in real-time. It features command history, line editing capabilities, and job control, and is able to communicate directly as a shell script over the Internet and interact with a live server. It was developed by Keiju Ishitsuka. Program usage:

irb [ options ] [ programfile ] [ argument... ]

Example usage:

irb(main):001:0> n = 5
=> 5
irb(main):002:0> def fact(n)
irb(main):003:1>   if n <= 1
irb(main):004:2>     1
irb(main):005:2>   else
irb(main):006:2*     n * fact(n - 1)
irb(main):007:2>   end
irb(main):008:1> end
=> :fact
irb(main):009:0> fact(n)
=> 120

irb(main):001:0> class Cat
irb(main):002:1>   def meow
irb(main):003:2>     puts 'The cat meows.'
irb(main):004:2>   end
irb(main):005:1> end
=> :meow

irb(main):006:0> Cat.new.meow
The cat meows.

See also

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