July 5th 2011

Interactive Ruby Shell

One of the features that is installed when you install Ruby is a program commonly known as IRB. It stands for Interactive Ruby Shell.

IRB allows you to execute small Ruby programs in an interactive way without typing out a full program and all that comes with it. To start IRB, type irb at the command prompt.

Here are a couple of quick examples:

Show an object’s methods

Show Methods

Evaluate a regular expression

Example Regex

Here is a blog post with plenty of other things you can do with irb.