ruby in some cases feel just like shell scripting, even more than perl.. you can even do piping to chain two commands together https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4234119/ruby-pipes-how-d... (edit: using the shell library https://github.com/ruby/shell so, not out of box in ruby, unfortunately, which is a mortal sin for replacing bash in scripts =/)

Here are the ways to run a program in ruby https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7212573/when-to-use-each...