How to retrieve exit status from ruby Open3.popen3()?

Question

I seem to be stuck trying to retrieve the exit status of a shell command which was started from ruby's Open3.popen3()-method.

Here's my code:

require 'open3'
stdin, stdout, stderr = Open3.popen3('ls')

When I now try to access $? it still is nil

Is it possible to retrieve the exit status after all?

Notes:
- ls is not the command I'm trying to use in my script. I just used this to give an example. My script is a bit more complex and contains user input, which is why I need the sanitizing functionality of Open3.
- I've also tried the block variant of popen3, but didn't succeed with that either.

Answer 1

popen3 yields/returns four parameters, stdin, stdout, stderr and wait_thr. wait_thr contains a method wait_thr.value which returns the exit status of the command (in fact, it is a Process::Status object according to documentation). Also have a look at http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/open3/rdoc/Open3.html#method-c-popen3

Answer 2

The concise answer is to use the 4th parameter of open3: wait_thr

• get whether any error is indicated: wait_thr.value.success?
• get the actual error level: wait_thr.value.exitstatus

Sample:

Open3.popen3(command) do |stdin, stdout, stderr, wait_thr|
  return_value = wait_thr.value
end
puts "Error level was: #{return_value.exitstatus}" unless return_value.success?

Answer 3

Everything you need (standard output, error and exit code) in three lines:

require 'open3'
stdin, stdout, stderr, wait_thr = Open3.popen3("sleep 5; ls")
puts "#{stdout.read} #{stderr.read} #{wait_thr.value.exitstatus}"