Confused one Ex:20. ri File

Ruby
#1

So in exercise 20 I’m going through the study drills and it tells me to look up what the “seek” function does. I know that this function will seek to a position of our file, setting it to 0 seeks to the beginning of the file.

What I am confused about is when it starts talking about ri File and ri “File#seek”. I have not been able to find anything online about these things. I saw something about ri being “Ruby Index” but I found no correlation to “seek” or anything.

Would someone mind explaining to me what these two commands do? And if they’re used in command line or in the script themselves?

#2

ri indeed stands for Ruby Index. It’s a program included with Ruby that lets you view the Ruby documentation from your command line.

$ ri File means "give me the documentation for the File class.

$ ri File#seek means "show me the documentation for the #seek method of the File class. # is used in documentation to indicate an instance method.

Here’s an example of what you should see when running $ ri "File#seek":

= File#seek

(from ruby core)
=== Implementation from IO
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  ios.seek(amount, whence=IO::SEEK_SET)  -> 0

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seeks to a given offset anInteger in the stream according to
the value of whence:

  :CUR or IO::SEEK_CUR  | Seeks to _amount_ plus current position
  ----------------------+--------------------------------------------------
  :END or IO::SEEK_END  | Seeks to _amount_ plus end of stream (you
                        | probably want a negative value for _amount_)
  ----------------------+--------------------------------------------------
  :SET or IO::SEEK_SET  | Seeks to the absolute location given by _amount_

Example:

  f = File.new("testfile")
  f.seek(-13, IO::SEEK_END)   #=> 0
  f.readline                  #=> "And so on...\n"
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