Ruby - Print Environment Variables

1. Introduction

Environment variables are essential pieces of information stored on your computer that describe the system environment. They can influence the behavior of programs and can store settings like paths, configurations, and more. In Ruby, it's simple to fetch and display these environment variables. In this post, we'll see how to do just that.

2. Program Steps

1. Open your Ruby programming environment or any text editor.

2. Utilize Ruby's built-in ENV object to access environment variables.

3. Loop through the ENV object to print each key-value pair representing each environment variable and its value.

3. Code Program

# Loop through and print each environment variable
ENV.each do |key, value|
  puts "#{key}: #{value}"
end

Output:

PATH: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
HOME: /home/username
... (and so on, depending on the environment variables set on your system)

4. Step By Step Explanation

1. ENV: This is a built-in Ruby object that provides a hash-like interface to environment variables.

2. ENV.each: We use the each method, which is a common method available for hash-like objects in Ruby, to loop through each key-value pair in the ENV object.

3. puts "#{key}: #{value}": Inside our loop, we print out the environment variable name (key) and its corresponding value.

Accessing environment variables is crucial in many scenarios, especially when working with configurations, paths, or sensitive data in your Ruby applications.


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