Emulate a Simple Unix Shell in Ruby

We've been issuing commands in our terminals like rake db:migrate or rails new, and last week we even wrote a commandline app in ruby, but how do these commands work under the hood? How does typing ruby ./wikipedia_roulette.rb launch our app? This week we'll get some insight into this by building a fun emulator.

We'll cover the following topics:

• command-line argument parsing
• basic *nix commands
• standard input, output, and error streams

If we have time, we'll cover some of these:

• output redirection to a file
• piping the output of one command into the input of another
• useful commands like grep, find, and less