---
title: How to execute shell commands with Ruby
slug: how-to-execute-shell-commands-with-ruby
published_at: 2022-09-23 12:00:37 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:22 +0000
summary: 
description: How to execute shell commands with Ruby
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, shell commands, how to execute shell commands with ruby]
views: 860
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/how-to-execute-shell-commands-with-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMXhunvRkU
youtube_id: tdMXhunvRkU
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/tdMXhunvRkU
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tdMXhunvRkU/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# How to execute shell commands with Ruby

*Published: September 23, 2022*
*Views: 860*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMXhunvRkU)

[![How to execute shell commands with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tdMXhunvRkU/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMXhunvRkU)

## Description

How to execute shell commands with Ruby

## Transcript

how do you execute shell commands from ruby suppose you have this thing that you want to execute calling out to this shell command echo passing in hello tic toc where typically it would just print out or give you the feedback to standard output whatever string you passed into echo we can start by founding it with backticks and then printing that out if we say execute program we get the result of this system call as a string so it shows us that the string includes this new line at the end another alternative is that we can call system and pass in the string that we want to execute and what this will return is just a value true or false whether or not this executed another alternative is to call exec and when we run exec you'll notice that we don't get any output printed out but hello tick tock happens that's because when we're running the running program is replaced by whatever we're passing in inside exec the last one was that you can use percent x and this will work very similar to the back ticks and you don't have to use parentheses here you can use whatever terminating you want to use square brackets or curly braces you can use that so those are the four ways you can execute shelf we have backticks and percent x which both execute and return the result from standard output we have system which will return it to or false whether or not we have a positive exit and then finally we have exec which will replace the running program with whatever you passed in you

---

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