bmizerany/recho

Recho is a small Ruby library that recreates two classic command-line utilities, echo and cat, so you can use them inside Ruby code. It lets you write text to files and combine file contents using syntax that feels similar to what you'd type in a terminal shell. The library provides two main functions. echo writes a string to a file, and you can use it to create a new file or append to an existing one. cat reads the contents of one or more files and combines them together. The library also overrides Ruby's comparison operators, so you can use > to write to a file and >> to append to one, just like shell redirection. This means a statement like echo("hello") > "file.txt" actually creates the file and writes the text in one step. The primary audience is Ruby developers who spend a lot of time in the shell and want their Ruby scripts to read and write files using the same mental model. If you're writing a build script, a Rakefile, or a small automation tool and find yourself wishing you could just use shell-style file operations instead of looking up Ruby's standard file-handling methods, this gives you that option. It's a convenience tool for people who think in shell syntax. What's notable is the approach to syntax. Rather than wrapping file operations in standard method calls, the project uses Ruby's operator overloading to mimic shell behavior directly. This is a deliberate tradeoff: it makes the code immediately readable to shell users, but overriding operators like > for file writing is unconventional in Ruby and could surprise developers expecting standard comparison behavior. The project is small and focused entirely on this one stylistic choice.