Iterate through every file in one directory

Question

How do I write a loop in ruby so that I can execute a block of code on each file?

I'm new to ruby, and I've concluded that the way to do this is a do each loop.
The ruby file will be executed from a different directory than the directory I want to loop through.

I've tried the Dir.foreach and I couldn't get it to work.

Answer 1

As others have said, Dir::foreach is a good option here. However, note that Dir::foreach and Dir::entries will always include . and .. (the current and parent directories). You will generally not want to work on them, so you can use Dir::each_child or Dir::children (as suggested by ma11hew28) or do something like this:

Dir.foreach('/path/to/dir') do |filename|
  next if filename == '.' or filename == '..'
  # Do work on the remaining files & directories
end

Dir::foreach and Dir::entries (as well as Dir::each_child and Dir::children) also include hidden files & directories. Often this is what you want, but if it isn't, you need to do something to skip over them.

Alternatively, you might want to look into Dir::glob which provides simple wildcard matching:

Dir.glob('/path/to/dir/*.rb') do |rb_filename|
  # Do work on files & directories ending in .rb
end