Running an external process from Ruby

Running an external process from a Ruby script is quite easy: use backticks (output = `command`) or the %x method (output = %x[command]).

There are more options like system and exec and even more advanced ones like popen, popen3 and popen4 that allow you to manage process stdin/stdout/stderr.

A good resource with more examples is Nate Murray's 6 Ways to Run Shell Commands in Ruby.